AI is useful as tool like he said, unfortunately these days in many organisations it is used as a replacement rather than a tool.

His conclusion was that as AI tools get more capable, the people who actually understand how systems work become more valuable, not less — because someone still has to review, maintain, and take responsibility for what the tools produce.

Humans still need to learn how to code.

Tools are just tools

I don't think that's true, but we simply disagree on that.

I don't think he's hypocritical. He simply doesn't have to deal with that negative impact he "warns" about. He is in support of using it as a tool and thinks the criticism is invalid. That's a consistent perspective, even if I don't agree with it.

If he used LLMs to create bug reports, but also complained about LLM written bug reports he gets, that would be hypocritical.

bingo. and unfortunately the lazy and inexperienced are using it more than others, or using it at a much higher degree. Linus even says it himself. they file a report and then "vanish" because they can't answer follow up questions or clarifications because they don't know how. if you deal with LLMs and the people that use them as much as I do for my job you see this constantly. daily even. they "build" something and when it's reviewed and questioned the answers are just no where to be found because the "coder" can't answer them.

Like the other day there's this guy on Youtube who is a huge advocate for Omarchy for whatever reason. older guy but he's always going on about how great Omarchy is. he posts a video about how "we" built some application for Omarchy but the entire video is him putting prompts into Claude Code and then walking away. never touches it, never writes a line of code. but there were glaring bugs with the build so I reached out to him, asked him how he was going to address these things and hoping he wouldn't put this app out there because it's clearly broken. works on a surface level but it WILL break. he essentially told me to "fuck off".

you're right an LLM is a tool but one that should be in the hands of those that know what they're doing. you wouldn't hand a hammer to a child and tell them to build a house. you wouldn't hand a gun to a junkie and tell them they're now a cop. I wouldn't hand Vim to my mother and tell her to build a website. I feel LLMs should require human training just like any other tools we use. If you want to allow LLMs into your open source project, sure, have at it but it should be YOUR responsibility to vet and interview each individual that wishes to contribute utilizing said tools.

But if you use AI to find issues, then investigate the issue, reproduce it, document it, etc, then you’ve got something meaningful that someone can do something with.

In principle that is sound, but LLMs can't do that, yet, if ever. Sounds like anthropomorphism. The 'hallucination' thing is intrinsic. What you can do is point it at easily verifiable problems like searching for security flaws, and then verify them. Whether that's cost effective in wasted energy and human time is still an open question, especially as token cost ramps up pre IPO.