This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Oh, please... is it still a text generator, or is it already a religion?
In his commit message:
[And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.
I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.
I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.
But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.
This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus "round_up()" to a "round_down()", but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus ]
Didn't he state quite early on that LLMs were a good tool to spot bugs? Found this from 3 years ago: https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/
Hackers use LLMs to spot odd exploits so it makes sense developers use them too. The usage of LLMs in development likely won‘t make Linux better or safer overall, because bugs and exploits wouldn‘t have been found by either side without it in the first place. It‘s like pandora‘s box where Linus is kind of forced to use it. If that makes sense.
He might consider himself forced to use it to find bugs. He wouldn't be forced to use it to write the fix.
(Now you might say he wasn't or isn't, but even if that were true for the kernel at large this doesn't seem to be: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/10/linus-torvalds-says-ai-has-made-huge-linux-kernel-updates-the-new-normal/5285268 And this seems like mostly to be on Linus, for not stepping in here.)
Following the hacker arm race is a good point. But also the number of bugs is not a bottomless pit. If an LLM allows to find more, and hopefully the test and reviews are good enough to limit the new opportunities to introduce some from LLMs, it should reduce the overall number of bugs and make the software generally safer.
NetBSD banned submitting "Tainted Code" in their commit guidelines...
https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html
May be time to dump Linux, Linus.
AI code bans may be impossible to enforce in the first place
I hate this attitude that if a rule or standard can't be enforced perfectly, we shouldn't strive for it. We can't (reasonably) run an OS free of proprietary software, does that mean the free software movement should just give up?
This isn't a case where something can't be enforced perfectly, it is a case of something that can't be enforced at all going into the future. Every tool that can reliably detect LLM code is at the same time the tool used for adversarial training, making the generated code look more and more human. We are already at the point where for plain english the false positives and false negatives go through the roof, making these tools very unreliable and when applied automatically a liability. Code is a lot more formalized, with a lot less personal variance (spelling, vocabulary and grammar are basically fixed - only the used logic and how it is implemented is variable), making detection harder by default than in natural languages.
If LLM code can't be detected anymore by automated means - and that state of things is approaching fast - then any policy about allowing or restricting LLM code is not worth the paper you would use to print it out. But that's not so much of a problem. The more important policy to set, that can also be enforced, is that everyone submitting code has to take personal responsibility regarding the quality of the submission. Delivering bad code - when not happening while training to become a better coder and looking for feedback - has to lead to consequences based on the seriousness of the case and if it's a repeat offender. Anyone using an LLM to spit out bullshit LQ code will run into that kind of rule very fast.
I think one way is to make people realize that there is a concept in copyright called Threshold of Originality, meaning that because machine generated output in itself is not creative work, it's not copyrightable. You can do literally anything with it, the licenses attached don't matter. The GPL is not enforceable and no proprietary EULA is enforceable.
The entire point of GPL is to forcefully extract copyright out of the code in the first place.
I think of it like age verification. Slipperly slope to a proprietary kernel-level "security compliance module" on all devices, aka the end of general computation.
I hate this attitude that if a rule or standard can’t be enforced perfectly, we shouldn’t strive for it.
This is the entire basis for the War on (some) Drugs. Guess what? Drugs won.
Power is nothing without enforceability, and purposely implementing rules or laws that can't be enforceable is a form of malice and discrimination through selective enforcement.
So Debian, what are you going to do now?
Edit: nm, they allow LLM written code now.
I’m glad Linus is pragmatic about this, ethical questions aside LLM’s are a highly valuable tool in software development and they are likely to continue to improve. Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are. Open weight LLM’s have also come a long way and are already good enough for daily use.
ethical questions aside
And his here is the problem. Oh yeah lets just waive off the biggest critisicm on and issue of AI.
Hitler was a pretty neat guy, ethnic cleansing aside.
And before you say this, no, i am not comparing you to hitler, I'm only using an over the top example to hopefully make my point more clear.
Yeah, ethical, environmental, legal and fuck the consumer memory questions aside.
That’s every corp and government in existence.
Well it’s about time those slackers caught up. And all they needed was a slop machine.
Seems like an AI apologists article. Sounds a bit like "bans are hard so why even bother."
No, the alternatives exist and people can choose them where able: https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index Sure, not all things are available AI free, e.g. there's no Linux kernel (NetBSD doesn't run on as much hardware), but that doesn't mean there's no point in choosing no AI software where possible, if you care about it.
The enforceability part seems the most apologist to me. You never could really know if some contributor wasn't copying leaked Windows XP code into your FOSS project. If you trust contributors that little, don't let them contribute.
If the model is adequately FOSS, i.e. open weights, and can run on a single consumer GPU (or NPU), and the "author" (quotations because I'm personally undecided if one can claim code generated by an aforementioned model is theirs) understands it, then I really don't see what the problem is...
Personally I have nothing against SLMs/LLMs as a technology, to me my grievances against ChatGPT or Claude are mostly about their environmental impacts and selling us back our own art, also keeping knowledge behind a for-profit black-box - if those aren't appropriate for a specific model, then I say using that model is fair, and good for productivity.
I'd take a model whose training data is open source and legitimately obtained. The only ones I know about are Apertus and OLMo, and they aren't really competitive.
Unfortunately not yet, no, true FOSS models are likely many years away, but I would argue that that follows typical FOSS lifecycles. Emerging technology is typically outperformed by proprietary endeavors, which creates an audience, and then that audience undertakes a FOSS implementation that initially underperforms, then just about competes, then eventually overtakes (i.e, GNU/Linux).
This will also be quite the test for the Lemmy slopwarriors
Open Source and git mean this is basically a non issue. It's just effort to manage it again.
People can fork a pre... 2020? version if they insist and if it's enough people who want that, they can group up again and form a new community.
The problem AI slop coding is mostly the untested bullshit that causes problems. That's not going to happen because I believe that a good bunch of stuff is thoroughly tested now, and also, this is maintainers doing it. If it doesn't work, it's their project, their career and their success on the line. And again, the worst possible outcome is that people have to roll back to an older version.
The code we use is not art the same way that gen-ai replaces "real artists". I agree with opposing that tech in that area, and I agree with rejecting unchecked, untested, hallucinated nonsense in coding too, especially when it promises new features in corpo software that you are forced to use, and then have that fail on you.
But there will be a very normal selection process happening. If the process doesn't work, the software will fail and lose users.
I fully support the people who absolutely reject it though, that means diversity of approaches and that's good.
What was that random desktop image in the middle of the article for? It's that the author's? What kind of impression did he expect his elf babe wallpaper to convey?
