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.
So the AI was wrong multiple times but it is being given credit because the human powered through the process.
If a human had done it I assume they would be called lazy for not trying hard enough. Meh.
Yeah but it’s wrong FAST. That might sound like the punchline of a joke but it’s really useful to see an idea written out in code to see why it was a bad idea and what to try next.
I believe it takes a deep knowledge of programming and LLMs in general, to know when they could be useful and how to use them in those cases. You first need to know they are not a magic genie, they are a machine learning thing, trained on tokens, that will output the more likely next token. And understand how the training process, the weights and the whole thing works inside to know how its going to react under certain inputs.
Then you must deeply know the problem you are dealing with. You need to know what’s good, what’s bad, when a solution actually works and when it does not.
If those factors are meet I don’t see much issue in using them for programming.
Yeah. Linus knew what he was doing here, all the AI was doing was writing simple debug code and reading the output. It was just saving him from manually writing that code. And given the prodding he had to do, I’m not sure it actually saved him any time or energy.
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.
Anyone disappointed by Linus’ flawed moral conpass hasn’t been listening to him
Good. Glad to hear he’s using the tools available to good effect
And that’s where we start to toe the line on what could be deemed as an “ethical” use of LLM in free software production. Local models used to debug, but not write code? Maaaaaaybe acceptable?
Sorry but no. Contrary to what some activist types want you to believe it’s not about actual ethical use when we are talking about software.
It’s about LLMs being a tool that should be used where it’s the proper and efficient tool for the job (see: here) and that should definitely not be used where it isn’t the proper tool (vibe coded bullshit) just because some PR guy told you that this tool is your shiny new hammer and everything is a nail now.
When LLMs can produce proper reviewable code use them ffs… alas, they can’t in any case complex enough to actually justify their use.
And I expected the comment and the discussion to be controversial. I am on the team that avoids AI as much as humanly possible, and I still write code the old-fashioned way (maybe with some LLM-free macros via Bash, but otherwise AI-less unless Google has inadvertently slipped something of the sort in my search results). This is because I’m well aware of the widespread dismissal of copyright law for training data, the obscene costs of training itself, the hallucinations and the sycophancy intrinsic in the way a neural network is trained. But unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag, and plenty of developers now use it routinely, and those same developers are effectively trying to toe the line to see how much are they allowed to use the cheat engine before being demanded to stop.
it’s not about actual ethical use when we are talking about software
This deeply misunderstands ethics. All actions are moral choices. Do I understand you correctly that you propose the polar opposite, that no actions are moral choices, with regards to software? I don’t expect you’d say it’s ethically fine to write software to orchestrate a genocide.
No, I just reject the notion that the ongoing discussion about AI use in software production is a moral/ethical one. That’s a bullshit narrative to actually discredit all the good reasons against AI by making up a mostly fictional “but it’s just ideology”-argument.
Yes actions include moral choices. But actions that are stupid and make no sense at all don’t need to be discussed in terms of is it ethically okay to do it, because that’s not the interesting point there.
I won’t discuss about the moral choice of hitting my thumb with a hammer, even less to when I tried hammering in a screw like a moron. So I will also not discuss imaginary topics of ethical use of AI in coding. Because it’s bullshit. It produces low quality slob. It’s a scam trying to tell people with no clue about programmning that they can totally do it, too, while trying to gas-light programmers into believing that they really, really need to use that tool for coding or be left behind. Using AI for coding because you already used it for debugging tasks is not an ethical discussion. Just like using a hammer for a screw because you already hammered in nails is not one. It’s a discussion about what AI CAN do and what it CAN’T. Discussions if you SHOULD use AI for a specific task have to happen AFTER you determined if it makes sense first place. And to return the hammer analogy a third time (it’s a magic number after all…): If someone would try to argue that we need to discuss the ethics of hammering in a screw because it already worked with a nail, would you agree that all actions have ethical implications that need to be considered or would you dismiss him because the ethical discussion is not relevant. I did the latter in my comment.
Again: If using AI for coding for real world purposes (and I don’t talk about non-technical people building their low quality app here… that’s mostly a gimmick) was viable, sure… use it. Or let’s start an ethics discussion then. That’s fine with me, too.
But don’t pretend that the actual discussion right know, mainly lead by clueless people evaluating a new gimmick with very little understanding of its actual capabilities (and limits) and CEOs willing to believe in any snake oil if it promises to help them get rid of those obnoxious workers demanding pay (it won’t - every actual fact and number tells us that AI is in fact more expensive, even before figuring in the human employees also needed to hold the leash) is one about ethical use in coding. It isn’t. It’s about a discussion between those that use AI for the things it can do and avoid it where it’s useless and those that somehow have found their new religion and saviour and try to make everything about a) those in tech that use AI because they obviously have seen the light and converted and b) those still left in the dark and fighting their new god for made up moral or other reasons.
That’s a fairy tale completely ignoring the third group: technical people that use AI only and exactly where it makes sense. A fairy tale mostly pushed by a few people behind AI development because they already sunk such insane sums into it that they need to believe (and make you believe) that an (human level or more) artificial general intelligence is just around the corner. Just think about it: there people are actually taking about the equivalent of creating new life (new artificial conciousness) to justify their insane investments. And we should talk about the ethical implications of using AI in coding? How is that not a distraction?
Btw… now that I thought about it (and spelled some of it out) I want to walk back to my earlier statement. If AI is actually able to do soon™ what the morons behind it are proposing, that’s indeed the moment to start an ethics discussion. A very complicated one about definitions of conciousness and life… good thing that this will not actually happen.
Not really. It’s still not ethical to exploit the labor of others, even when our favorite computer nerd does it.
Ultimately the working people who created the data that was used to train the AI have not given consent and were not compensated for their work. Instead, Linus is paying money (probably the Linux Foundations’ money?) to a large corporation that is exploiting the unpaid work, skills and culture of human beings.
In ethics the ends don’t often justify the means.
Not to mention it’s unclear what the LLM even did to help debug this issue, because he seems to suggest it lead him him astray multiple times claiming that it was impossible to fix.
Professional athlete uses bracelet to run fast.
If you buy the same bracelet, you’ll be just as fast!
I admire Linus Torvolds a lot. His works, the orginazations he’s built, and his public speaking are all really well thought out imho, but I don’t care when he poops and how much the log weighed.
Every time he does anything AI now a couple or articles crop up and get passed around. Its honestly annoying.
He’s a 56 year old man, so he probably uses AI to decide what to eat for breakfast.
Yeah, Torvalds is such a dummy! You’re certainly much smarter than him.
