Linux

I don’t generally take issue LLMs used as a tool, but I do have a huge problem with lazy slop slingers. I also don’t like that the frontier models are closed source and rent-seeking, especially when they were trained on copyleft code and by all rights should themselves be open source if they were respecting the licenses. I’d think Linus would have something to say about that.

IMO, a decent philosophy is that LLMs can be useful tools, but if anyone can tell you used a LLM, you failed. People should have a healthy fear of being ridiculed for outsourcing their critical thinking. Anyone using a ton of tokens shouldn’t be commended; instead, the quality of their work should be called into question because they’re likely using LLMs as a crutch instead of a tool. Commits by Claude probably mean the person didn’t review the diff to clean up the slop, and also probably didn’t understand the changes well enough to write a clear commit message themselves. I wouldn’t want to see any commits crediting Claude in the Linux kernel.

Edit:

I’d also think that if Linus likes LLMs and wants to see quality tech democratized, he’d be advocating for FOSS LLMs under the Linux foundation where all code and training data are open source. What we have now with Anthropic and “OpenAI” is the equivalent of cloud-hosted Windows, and open weight models like Qwen are more like Windows XP in that they can be run locally, but they’re still proprietary and can’t be inspected, modified, or built upon. We need the Linux of LLMs.