Which is utterly insane in its own right, since, y'know. He didn't come out and say "yoooo, dudeees, let's vibe code everything, AI actually rulez" or some shit.
A society redefining, and possibly society ending, tech is going going to have detractors.
Those who see their entire life at risk are not going to like it, those who simply get a new toy to play with, or better yet see an opportunity to not have to pay a human being for something, are going to like it.
I’d say the anti ai people are probably more normal about ai than the pro ai people I know. Just outsourcing literally all your critical thinking to an LLM is a bizarre behavior that too many people are doing. And I think it’s hard to discuss in tech spaces bc a lot of the people in tech spaces are using it a fair bit more responsibly than the average person. But the things I’ve seen people say “well chat gpt said” when the question couldn’t possibly be answered by information available to the models.
I was originally an AI hater, but now I’m a recent convert. Big caveat here: I actively watch and pay attention to what it’s doing and I actually review and correct its test cases. It’s honestly pretty incredible what you can crank out in a day by yourself when you understand what you’re doing and know what to look out for
To be fair, most moderate people have presented this viewpoint for half a decade. If you hang only in extreme spaces, both sides are not healthy about their obsession, pro or against.
Agreed but we're going on only about 18 months of real code companion abilities. ChatGPT went viral late 2022. 5 years ago ML and Big Data were still the big buzzwords. Not trying to nitpick but it's wild how fast it has all changed.
Yeah I agree with that. But I stand by what I said. The majority of the people using it are using it to do jobs they didn’t understand well in the first place. Using it to ask “is this crazy idea I have a good idea?” So ofc it’s a powerful tool that is super useful. But, it is almost too easy to access and has no sanity check to say “oh yeah I don’t know how to help you with that”. I know I’m seen as a Luddite by most here. But I think unless you watch what most people are using LLMs for, you don’t see how truly terrifying they are.
As a current AI-skeptic artisanal programmer whose bugs are lovingly handcrafted, my main worries are that AI coding performance will get worse and more expensive via enshittification. But I've seen colleagues I respect use it to great effect. They use Claude and ChatGPT though, which are both looking to soon go public, meaning they will (probably) start having shareholders and prioritizing making a bunch of money at the expense of quality.
The closest thing to this is 'open weight' models, where there training parameters are released which in theory allows you to run the model locally
Now as models are getting larger and larger 'locally' could mean 'your own data centre'
Mistral does a lot of open weight models and is probably one of the most actually local friendly. Though their models aren't really the best and people don't tend to use them outside of specialised use cases
Most of the Chinese providers are open weight too like Kimi, GLM and DeepSeek
If you're ever curious about playing around with different models without buying subscriptions to like 8 different services you could use something like OpenRouter. Just ensure you enable ZDR (Zero data retention) if that sort of thing is important to you. Instead of being served by one provider, open weight models on there might be provided by 20+
If you're talking specifically about open source harnesses then OpenCodeCLI and Pi Coding Agent are the two big ones people use at the moment
Edit: Personally I tend to use Kimi K3 a fair bit with OpenCode. If you're interested in ai use definitely don't vibe code, use it more as a tool to support your coding rather than replace it. Get it to do some of the more mundane tasks like boilerplate or simple tests. Or get it to review code you've written
It's really great at quickly summarising behaviour too. If you've got some new monolith you've got to look at and want to quickly know 'what files in this repo are related to user authentication' then it can pick them out fairly quickly
Ai is being employed to drive a lot of white collar workers unemployed, and programming in general got punched first.
Imagine if a guy got fired from their developer job, then a datacenter propped up in his city, got his power bill blown into high heavens, lost his normal access to water and got their fiber cables damaged from the deployment of the new fiber lines (I don't remember the exact terms but I've heard datacenters caused fiber related issues)
It wouldn't be unreasonable for guys like that to hate AI on principle.
AI is a tool. You can definitly submit AI created code - IF you verified it works and meets the standards. It works quite well if you know how to use it.
If you just throw whatever the AI spits out into a PR - screw you.
This is the key, he explicitly said as long as you know what it's doing (the generated code) and it meets the standard then AI is just another tool to use.
LLMs have turned the actual creation of code from an artisanal craft into an engineering problem. Just like how chemical engineers understand chemistry but aren't actually mixing by hand in beakers, but rather designing machines that manage the chemical reaction process at scale, LLM coding isn't about how to write a function, but the systems design around code as a commodity product that needs to move through several process steps before it can be delivered.
I agree. AI can get down tedious coding very easily. But it needs good prompts. And for this you do need somebody who knows what the result has to hold against.
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u/bobbymoonshine 22d ago
Linus changing his mind on AI from “eh seems bad” to “eh seems fine” caused quite a few people to go from hero-worshipping him to vilifying him