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Linus Torvalds used AI to fix a Linux bug, and now LLM critics on Linux face an uncomfortable choice
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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I think the people most extreme about it haven't done much development.
Or they have, professionally, and associate it with very real AI psychosis at work.
Or they're in school and see LLMs ruining the student body, as we've seen some in other Lemmy posts.
It all comes down to ethical tool sourcing, and using those tools in moderation, responsibly. Like all sorts of other automation/technology that's popped up in programming...
But I guess I'm saying I can sympathize with absolute "no-LLM-code" positions, too. The way true vibe-coding has been peddled to the public really has done tremendous damage, and honestly the space deserves the negative attention its getting, and then some.
The fact of the matter is as an AI hater I do actually trust AI generated code if run through the right people. I just don't know when the people I trust will trust the AI more than themselves, and that's part of the worry. Are they going to be as diligent on checking their AIs bug fix #125 if the first 124 were perfect? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly am not trusting AI code in the hands of vibe coders who have no idea what they're doing and are only contributing to a project because it happens to allow AI contributions.
I also just don't like LLMs in general, the way they collected data, the way they were trained on data, the way they are affecting communities across the globe, and the harm the people at the top of these companies are doing, not to mention the job loss which is really not a main concern of mine. I don't like the idea of people using tools that are so harmful if it can be avoided.
I'd wager people like linux devs will learn exactly how unreliable they are, quickly, once they start using them. Its kind of impossible to miss.
There's a chance some devs succumb to AI psychosis, but that's why these large open source projects are institutionalized. No one person can ruin them, by design.
As for ethics, I think the open weights LLMs are far more ethical, albeit far from perfect. They're trained modestly, presented as tools, apache licensed, self host able, more efficient to run, and good enough; people just need to know they exist as an alternative.
Open weight LLMs are not trained any differently than all the others. They just publish the weights. It's still massive theft run through a data center.
There is no (good) coding LLM trained ethically because securing rights to the amount of code and text required has not been attempted and is likely not possible. The best you can do is a company who hid a "by using this service you give us rights to use your code/writing to train our LLM" into a six page EULA no one reads and that's just a different kind of unethical.
Some models like Nemotron use open datasets, and utilize hardware more efficiently than OpenAI and such.
Its (IMO) also quite different when the weights are Apache licensed. If absolutely zero profit is involved, that gets close to the "fair use" umbrella, IMO, like other noncommercial derivative works of restrictively licensed content (fanfics/fanart).
You are not wrong about the closed datasets though, for the vast majority of LLMs. Lord knows what the Chinese trainers or OpenAI use to train...
But anything truly "open weights" is still a different order of magnitude in the ethics scale, IMO. I view the primary issue to be profiting off the scraping and training; take that away, and its not nearly as egregious.
Almost everybody that brings up ethical LLMs is full of shit because they point to them existing as a defense then turn around and use claude.
I don't. I've never had an OpenAI or Claude subscription. Basically the only thing I've used Claude API for is science/testing when comparing it to an open weights model, and I haven't done that in some time.
I've never felt a need to, either.
Not that Im perfectly innocent or anything. Or that you're wrong. People DO exactly this, and it makes me scratch my head.