Comment by rcxdude
20 hours ago
>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.
It might be a highly technical and nuanced point, but while the subjective explanations Linus gives are neutral indeed, the stance is binary, and he took what to my estimation is the wrong approach "allowing llm generated code in the repo". The only sensible approach in any software or non software project is "LLM output is not acceptable content". Projects should see themselves as input for the LLMs, not as channels for LLM output. If you start corrupting your projects with LLM output, they will soon be tarnished and either removed from LLM training data, or enter a lossy IO loop.
On to the technical point, LLM output is output, the source is the prompt, if you are going to commit something, commit the prompt. Second, code that is generated by LLMs is less maintainable, Linus entered late into the fad and anyone with 1 month of fiddling with AI knows that he will regret it soon, it's hard to undo once you corrupt your repo with slop, perhaps if it happens fast enough and there's no major releases it can be swept under the rug.
On to the nuanced point, Linux is purposefully designed to maximize user contributions, so accepting LLM contributions might well serve the particular purpose of linux, but I still think it's technically wrong to commit target code, only source code should be committed, and that's prompts.
But git itself is collapsing, it doesn't seem to be well suited for this new revolution, it doesn't track prompts, or it does so at the expense of the generated code. Maybe github can track target code as artifacts.
I think we are watching the collapse of Linux, Git and Linus. Certainly a bold position, so I don't blame you for being more conservative, but we can come back in a couple of months and see if we changed our minds.