Mine is that the useState hook is an actual plague on the entire React ecosystem. Regardless of your opinions of React, if you wanna use something then use it right.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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C++ is an awful language overall.
Linus is just some guy with good programming skills and not an authority over anything tech.
~~There aren't any good text editors in the wild. VSCode is awful apart from extension support. Kate is close to being perfect but lack of extensions are pulling it back. Vim, Helix, Emacs, NeoVim are all flex toys.~~ nvm just tried zed with AI disabled
AI bad
Upvoting because I disagree with every word of what you wrote.
That's the point lol
I somewhat agree. Most celebrated personalities in tech aren't programming geniuses - they were in the right area at the right time and had some luck. Zuckerberg is a good example.
I think kernel maintainers and rendering engines (browsers and others) have a higher base skill level. Like some web developers are clever and some are stupid, but I don't think there are stupid kernel maintainers.
The thing with Linus is that he's been involved, and at the pointy end, for decades. You or I may not agree with him on every issue, but you can acknowledge that he has experience and he has connections.
I have massive respect for the guy. He did so much for the open source community. But for some reason everything he says is interpreted as inarguable truth by most tech guys.
For example his opinions on AI are pure trash and bootlickery. Which is fine anyone can think anything. We just have to think for ourselves a little.
I agree that everyone needs to think for themselves, absolutely.
However, I struggle with this and it's kind of what I'm getting at:
Firstly, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who hate's AI more than me. It literally keeps me awake at night. I hate the environmental impact. I hate the people it's enriching. I hate the work it's stealing. I don't often use the word "hate" but it really does apply here.
That said, I always try to defer to the opinions of people with more experience than me, and as regards kernel maintenance and Linus, that's certainly true.
You've probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I know a bit about code, a bit about FOSS, a bit about linux, AI, and communities. So it's easy to underestimate the yawning chasm of experience and knowledge between myself and Linus.
That doesn't mean we have to blindly accept the opinions of others (I honestly haven't accepted Linus' opinion myself), but I'm aware of the profound discrepancy between my opinion and his and it concerns me.
All that aside, is it possible to acknowledge that something is the correct course of action even if it's not the ideal? I haven't been following the Linus / AI thing, but as I understand it a project like that kinda has to allow AI bug reports because threat actors will certainly be using AI to find exploitable bugs.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/14/linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits/
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Foundation-25p-AI-Slop
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=14c897740388216acd59477a382de327d5e27ba4
My argument against Linus would be that the non-LLM tooling is auditable and known. I know I can trust all the tooling below it and only read your code, but with LLMs they are explicitly trying to replicate good looking code and can generate a ton of it, so it becomes incredibly difficult to actually audit.
Again this is part of the discussion about Linus decisions which has been had ad-nauseum.
With the greatest respect, responding to this comment would be to engage in a discussion of whether Linus is right in this particular instance. I'm not willing to do that because I'm sure that's a conversation that's been had a billion times.
I was / am happy to talk about how we injest the opinions of experts in a more general way.
it gets down to whether experts are experts at everything. Linus is not an expert at anything outside of kernel maintenance. His opinions on whether we should use LLMs are null and void considering the massive effect on the planet. It'd be like if a nuclear engineer said we should be building more nuclear bombs for everyone to use, just so they could use nuclear engineer more freely. Like, their opinions about nuclear energy might be fine, but their opinions that have an effect on the entire planet are completely wack.
That's a really good point. There's loads of examples of this, like doctors don't give good nutrition advice, et cetera.
He doesn't really need any latitude to offer an opinion on whether these tools should be used on the Linux kernel.
Whether you should use an LLM to plan your shopping list, or understand your toddlers behavior, is not something you should listen to Linus about.
I mean he’s welcome to develop an LLM that is trained on only his own stuff and that doesn’t suck down water like a black hole. Until then he shouldn’t be offering opinions on using them at all, I don’t care if it’s in regard to the Linux kernel or not.
Maybe my point with the nuclear bombs wasn’t clear enough. The nuclear engineer doesn’t get to decide to use a nuclear bomb, they get to use one tiny tiny little part. If they try to use a nuclear bomb we should all be stopping them, I don’t care how much they want to use it cause they think it’s a good tool. It’s provably horrific for humanity.
Could you be serious, though?
All authorities are just some guy with good programming skills. The giants on whose shoulders we stand were mostly rich guys who had the privilege of screwing around. I prefer the original definition of genius - not a quality that a person possesses, but an external spirit that comes and visits you.
Zed is actually a pretty good editor IMO. Miles ahead of Code at least
I just tried out Zed and the way it does extensions and services is so awful from both a security and configurability standpoint I ended up immediately switching back to Helix. At least Gram is an option if you want one that's GUI-first and it doesn't automatically download random shit.
I thought zed was just a slop focused Code fork like Cursor?
Not a slop fork, they wrote their own rust graphics compositor, 10/10 will shill until they go shit heel
It really is remarkably better than Code. Single-window, multi-repo, multi-worktree support? Not a problem. Want a closer look at the diff? Why stop there, you can maximize every single panel. The Git integration is also so much better, no extensions required. Lots more stuff is integrated, yet less setup is required and somehow it is still much faster than Code.
You can really tell that a ton of thought went into this IDE
I’ve not even gone that deep with it, just writing code to keep my trash can purring along. It’s smoooth, responsive, everything is intuitive, and the language server support is 🤌
Nope. It’s written from scratch in rust. Not a fork at all.
If you do not want the AI, gram editor is a fork that works well
I like Nano :)
Well yes obviously; Nano is perfection but is normally left out to give the other text editors a chance.
I find it so weird that vi and/or vim is included (at least what I have seen so far) everywhere but not nano.
vi is so not intuitive
Give micro a shot
What makes it better/different?
Just try it
Found the differences and am intrigued.
Now I'd just need to unlearn some muscle memory ;)
That information about text editors is out of date - we now have Zed. Just ignore the "AI integration" bs, it's entirely optional
Also checkout Gram on Codeberg, it's Zed with all the AI trash and telemetry removed.
Right now I use Helix and I'm trying to decide whether to switch to Zed. Because it almost looks like a better editor at this point, except its configuration is not as declarative as I'd like and its AI service uses a bunch of closed providers.
Do they collect data though? This is important. If not I might give it a shot.
And also when you don't use AI, can you disable all AI UI features.
It’s opt-out telemetry sadly. I’ve been tempted to make a PR to make it op-in
Zed is totally open source, and the AI "features" are optional. When you set it up - at least when I did - it's one checkbox to disable. I don't remember about the telemetry you will have to have a look, I'm usually ok with that myself.
I came from VSCode and haven't found anything I miss. I especially don't miss the poor performance of VSCode, Zed is extremely lightweight!
I miss C# support, but I also think vscode's solution for that was shit too
Zed sucks in many of the ways that modern editors suck.
Autocompleting on characters that appear in code, and autocompleting in a way that overwrites the code you have already written are two incredibly stupid decisions that put a mark over any tool that adopts any one of them.
But then, Zed almost working, but in a way that still sucks was enough to motivate me into setting my Emacs properly, in a way that doesn't suck. So Zed gave me a good editor.
What makes you think C++ is awful?
The intention of C++ was to be C's replacement by adding objects into the programming language while also maintaining the fast compilation and runtime that came with C. In the end it resulted in longer compilation and runtime times (from the millisecond scale to seconds scale), which made it generally unappealing for embedded systems.
On a production code standpoint, if were comparing it to something like python, it is debatable, but there's just a large learning curve associated with the language that could otherwise be avoided with a different OOP language. By trying to accomplish everything, it fails to implement everything well to compete with other languages.
It's painful to learn and set up. Looking at other people's code is horrifying. I looked at a portion of Godot code and the amount of headers defined is actually retarded. A lot of the c++ function names are a remnant of not well thought out ideas. It's also normal to have thousands of lines of code for a small portion of a small project?? The only way I see it being used is through vibe coding. You can't tell me it's easier to look at someone's C++ than their Python project.
Don't most people who use it try to avoid like 90% of the core language features
VSCode is like the worst fauxpen source ever.
Unrelated, but I absolutely adore your pfp.
Thanks!
I wouldn't say that vscode is awful. It's not good though. Even while being the best.
To add: jetbrains IDEs are awful
Yeah bloated privacy nightmares.
Isn't he the authority that approves what gets into the kernel? Or used to be at least.