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Linus Torvalds Working On A Hefty Linux Kernel Improvement With Claude Code (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 12 hours ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 4 points 2 hours ago

Watching Torvalds actions tearing this place apart is hilarious

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    [–] 29 points 8 hours ago (12 children)

    Almost anyone can cut and paste a face on a different body using a classic photo editor.

    It still takes a profesional to do it in a way that delivers a quality result.

    Linus Torvalds is a professional, the linux terminal is his baby, if we can trust anyone on this, its him.

    The amateurs using ai to produce slop that resembles what we perceive as quality, is sometimes hard to tell but 25 years ago people though half life 1 looked insanely realistic and that graphics could not possibly look any more real. Over time our brains will adapt and we will be able to tell slop from real work in a heartbeat. I bet most people here can already tell if a mail was written by an llm and not audited by a human with ease.

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  • [–] 34 points 6 hours ago (7 children)

    I'm worried about cognitive surrender. There's evidence of people losing skills they once had because they stopped doing it themselves and just get AI to do it for them.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 minutes ago

    Only in the sense using a calculator makes you worse at long division. You're still doing math.

    Every pearl-clutching article like 'doctors got worse at spotting cancer when we gave them a tool and then took it away' is only measuring before and after. None of them seem interested in asking: how much more cancer did they find, with the tool?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

    If he's still auditing and understanding the code. Something that he's done as a project manager for decades at this point. I don't see how it will. If the code is generated by a person or a machine. The auditing isn't much different.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

    Ironically, I find the LLMs to be better at auditing code than generating it in the first place. Like the humans they trained under, LLMs make mistakes and miss important things in both endeavors, but: when an LLM finds a real problem, that's a win no matter how you look at it.

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  • [–] 3 points 44 minutes ago (1 child)

    Definitely. I just hope that sooner rather than later it's possible for them all to move over to local open source models. Supporting wasteful content thieves is not sustainable.

    That and that all the GPU manufacturers Etc have their sound blaster moment. These days a lot of socs have quite powerful Graphics accelerators on them. At some point, someone's going to release a bit of silicon equivalent to the AC 97. May not have been able to compete with sound blaster on the ridiculously high end of the market. But was good enough for 99% of tasks. So that most people don't even remember sound blaster anymore. Even though they still technically exist.

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  • [–] 2 points 23 minutes ago

    I have been using "onboard graphics" professionally in our products, including products which do 3D rendering, since 2014.

    I think GPUs have a little longer life than sound blaster cards still in them, massive arrays of relatively simple CPUs have more purposes than just graphics rendering.

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  • [–] 14 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

    I can vouch for that: As a programmer, I can generally see both programming AI and general LLM use if it was copy-pasted. I know a guy who isn't a programmer who've used Claude Code to make an app, and things are working, but it's sooo clear even to a junior SE that it's vibe-coded. There's a clear lack of consistency, architecture, maintainability, and general human readability.
    However, if the code/text was reviewed and edited by a capable human programmer, it's incredibly difficult to single out what is a product of AI and not.

    Actual programmers who understand and can write code themselves who use AI simply as a tool, NOT a shortcut, will produce indistinguishable code. Linus is an incredibly smart and capable guy, and for specific uses, I'm confident in him using this tool responsibly.

    (The ethics of AI use is a different topic however...)

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  • [–] 6 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    How do you see the longevity of it. You obviously learnt how to code before ai. What about those learning now that are learning only having access to ai. Id anticipate the quality over time will deteriorate

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  • [–] 4 points 3 hours ago

    I think we'll unfortunately see a degradation over time of capable programmers, as it's with most other things: Humans learn poorly from seeing things being done for them, rather than doing it themselves. AI can be a good resource for iteration and a sort of rubber duck, and even for explaining things (with external confirmation). But as it currently stands, people find it much more attractive to just let AI do the work for them. That's the most prominent work culture after all, based on capitalistic values: Economic growth above all.

    I see it in schools as well, unfortunately: Students find it much more appealing to get good grades than to actually learn. Not everyone, of course, but still way too many.

    And I do understand many of the students: The bar for junior programmers has now increased, as a lot of employers simply think "why hire a human that is on the same level as AI?".

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    • [+] 1 point 5 hours ago
    [deleted]
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    [–] 25 points 11 hours ago (6 children)

    Meh, its less exciting whenever Claude Code is involved; I am wondering how many undetected bugs will sneak into the kernel. If he was going to use an LLM, he could at least use something local and not connected to one of the many nasty big corps that are ruining shit.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 hours ago* (4 children)

    You wouldn't want him using a local model unless he was running some fancy rig that could run a high end frontier model. He might not have such a thing laying around. Using the best out there for something like this is how you help avoid bugs.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    He gets paid more than enough to afford high end hardware.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 minutes ago*

    He definitely can afford it yes, but its still a big ask to want someone to spend 15-25k or whatever it would be (shits getting more expensive by the day) to use a tool that he can just do pay per use. The code is open source so its not like he'd be using a local llm to keep it private.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    Honestly, his mind and the community is probably one of the best things out there at the moment. They live the Linux Kernel, while that thing he used does not think or understand anything. Eh, it would be better if they moved with care instead, as that is a good way to avoid bugs too. I don't have a lot of faith in gassed up LLMs.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 minutes ago*

    He's doing it though. So that's kind or moot. Fable is out there finding bugs in these things, so seems like if he is going to do it, using the thing that's already making it more secure by finding multiple exploits is the right choice of what to use.

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    • [–] 23 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    "Improvement" huh

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    • [–] 9 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

    I'd love to see a pre-AI fork of the Linux kernel.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    I think some of the BSDs have no AI clauses.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 hours ago

    I ran it all through Slopscore and consulted open-slopware, and here are the results:

    • ⬛ Linux has at least 2,274 slop commits, to date.
    • 🟧 FreeBSD has at least 53 slop commits, including some from Anthropic themselves.
    • 🟨 OpenBSD and NetBSD have a couple of slop commits, but nothing colossal. NetBSD also requires any AI-generated code to be signed off by the core maintainers.
    • 🟨 DragonFly BSD has at least three slop commits.
    • 🟥 MidnightBSD has at least 292 slop commits.
    • ⬛ NextBSD is entirely vibecoded.
    • 🟩 MirBSD has an anti-AI policy, but only supports i386 and SPARC, and is currently unusable anyway.
    • 🟩 HyperbolaBSD has an anti-AI policy, but hasn't been released yet (they're still a Linux-libre distro).
    • 🟩 CoffeeBSD is a slop-free fork of FreeBSD, but has had no commits since it was forked.
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