Unrelated question, how do I pin the version of my kernel?
This is a bad idea. Now we don’t know who actually wrote the code, and therefore who owns (or doesn’t own) the copyrights. This is really, exceptionally stupid.
Given Torvalds’ attitude towards AI, it’s not surprising.
“They’ve gotten good enough to find bugs because LLMs, AI, are just pattern matchers and code is nothing but patterns in a specific format.”
True, but let’s not forget that
2 + 2 = 4can be achieved through a million different patterns[1], so just because AI can find a working pattern doesn’t make it goodLinus comparing AI to text editors and fucking compilers shows how high on his own farts he is. Given the same input, a compiler will always produce the same output, down to the last bit. The same cannot be said about AI - throw the same version of claude code with the same prompt on the same computer file and it will produce different results, maybe with a “similar enough” end result, but not identical.
AI is not a tool, it’s a million monkeys with keyboards that cannot be held accountable for their output.
(((((64 / 2) / 2) / 2) / 2) / 2) + (((((64 / 2) / 2) / 2) / 2) / 2)is a valid pattern for 2 + 2, for instance ↩︎
just because AI can find a working pattern doesn’t make it good
I have seen so much from AI supporters saying “it can be a good tool” to save time, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone try to make the claim that it’s a tool that leads to better code. That should be very telling.
That quote was someone else
“LLMs are good enough now,” said Greg Kroah-Hartman, a veteran Linux kernel maintainer, at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in South Korea in August. “They’ve gotten good enough to find bugs because LLMs, AI, are just pattern matchers and code is nothing but patterns in a specific format.”
Also to be fair, that quote is about finding bugs and the guy might not have been talking about using AI to patch them. The article makes it sound that way, but the article also seems overly confident and pro-AI about some other things too.
You can deterministically find something that is clearly defined, but bugs don’t fall into that category
I know, but even regarding bug catching, there have been a LOT of bogus bug reports “discovered by AI” that could not be replicated in any way, shape or form. Granted, I’ve seen one or two articles saying that AI helped find real software bugs, but what’s the ratio there, 1:500 for useful/useless AI bug reports?
Being a million monkeys or not, it is a tool. The relevant definition for tool is:
something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation
That’s not to say it’s a good tool, or that it’s a tool being used appropriately by many people. What even is appropriate use of AI?
Accountability should be definitely be properly assigned to the user. I’ve heard of tradies blaming their tools for shitty work, but I’ve never heard of one actually holding their hammer accountable…
What even is appropriate use of AI?
Industrial scale misinformation and scamming.
Also, sometimes the responsibility falls onto the tool maker. Remember Crowdstrike? That software update that caused widespread outages in Windows computers used by many organizations, including in airports? It wasn’t any user’s fault, surprisingly it wasn’t even Microslop’s fault, it was Crowdstrike’s fault alone.
let them. Seriously, let them do it.
And when the day comes, and it will, when something is submitted and approved and breaks shit then people can turn to the devs and Linus and say “I told you so.”
my decision a few months ago to start daily driving BSD doesn’t seem to be a bad one.
Linus and say “I told you so.”
Linus fully approves this. What imagination land do you live in?
then people can turn to the devs and Linus and say “I told you so.”
I bet his response will be an email with a dozen variations of “fuck you for insinuating that I have any responsibility, I didn’t approve that specific commit, it’s all <approver>'s fault who is a fucking imbecile”
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Unpopular opinion: it shouldn’t matter when it comes to code quality.
If it’s a dev with AI and the code is good, then it should be merged.
If it’s a dev with AI and the code is bad, then the code should be rejected.
If it’s a dev without AI and the code is good, then it should be merged.
If it’s a dev without AI and the code is bad, then the code should be rejected.
So in that case AI has no effect on the outcome. The only explanation I can see for making it visible is for the sake of licensing. Which I don’t have an opinion on right now because I haven’t looked into it enough.
People using AI push a lot more code in a shorter amount of time. That deluge makes it much more likely for bad code, intentional or not, to slip by.
“Just leave it to a few trusted devs”
Some bad actors can play the long game. The XZ Utils backdoor is a very recent example of a contributor trying to abuse a backdoor he put there himself, after 2 years of posing as a helpful person.
“Let AI review it”
If humans are prone to mistakes, why would anyone leave a probabilistic program that is known to make bad decisions at random and that has, on more than one occasion, “cheated” to pass quality tests, deleted files it shouldn’t and is still suceptible to prompt attacks, review it?
I understand the sentiment of “if the AI generated code is good, allow it”, but the “productivity” gains in writing code means that, sooner or later, the person using the AI will care less and less about reading and preemptively catching possible errors because there’ll be so many alterations that he either has to spend a month reading, or just skim over and accept.
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Harder for the people who don’t want backdoors or critical security bugs approved, you mean
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Can you ensure that the llm reviewing the code will not hallucinate and, more importantly, will not fall to some prompt injection that can be within the code?
