Comment by TZubiri
1 day ago
Nowadays not just big orgs are falling into the delusion, but also big people.
When Linus posted that AIs and vibecoding were here to stay and declared resistance to it as harmful, I stopped to consider whether I was wrong, but it has made me realize that in retrospect Linus Torvalds and Linux itself aren't actually the holy grail of computing. I didn't feel that way with Richard Dawkins, its not like falling for an AI psychosis retroactively made me question The Selfish Gene, but now I'm looking at linux and the theory that it's a clusterfuck is gaining so much traction, especially after copy.fail and ensuing rustification, I see so much clearly now. It was never about linux, UNIX sure, POSIX, yeah, GNU fucking aye, kernel? Ok whatever, drivers and scheduler with a gajillion lines of code I guess.
When did he post that "vibecoding" was here to stay? He is allowing AI generated code, and AI linting tooling in kernel development, but importantly, the expectation of human responsibility and review remains. This seems a far cry from vibecoding.
Besides the subjectives, here are two objective policy stances that Torvalds is defining for the Linux kernel development:
1- Maintainers are allowed to commit LLM generated output.
2- Criticism of LLM generated code is not welcome/will be ignored.
Now, whether that constitutes being pro-Vibecoding or pro-agentic engineering, whether it's delusion, whether it will have problems, that's subjective. But I feel that whatever way you look at it, it's a topic that polarizes engineers, and Torvalds is taking one side and not the other. It doesn't seem to me that it's a very neutral stance, although it may be more neutral than projects like Bun or OpenCode of course, if it feels neutral, it's cause the overton window is shifting.
>Criticism of LLM generated code is not welcome/will be ignored.
I would assume this is mainly that criticism that entirely amounts to 'this was written with an LLM' would be ignored. The actual quality of the code itself should be as open to criticism as any other piece of code in the kernel.
> It doesn't seem to me that it's a very neutral stance
Well, this is a matter of the window, isn't it? From my point of view Linus's opinion makes a great deal of sense, and is about as level-headed as anyone seems to get in this conversation. It's obvious that LLMs are useful. How useful, and for what tasks, and what downsides exist from using them, are all still in the mix, but the claim that LLMs are not at all useful for anything related to software feels like a very extreme claim to me at this point.
1 reply →