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.
I think the better analogy is, the advances in rocketry made under hitler were pretty neat and just because Hitler was an evil guy who did evil shit doesn’t mean we should have thrown that away. By all means stop giving money and influence to the big AI companies, but the advances made can still be repurposed.
Yes so of course my actual opinion is a little more nuanced than this. I absolutely see the uses of AI, I won’t deny that. I just fundamentally disagree with the way it is being used right now (by which I mean the gas-turbine-powered datacenters it requires, the noise pollution they create, the unethical/outright illegal acquiring of training data.
If you’re using a local model, whose training did not deprive actual people of huge amounts of water or electricity, and did not use stolen data, I’m all for it. But most people aren’t, they’re using ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever Microsoft is making.
Continuing your analogy, this would be like flying rockets manufactured by the third reich, not other companies using the same technologies.
Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are.
How do you measure that?
I am asking because I tried all the AI coding tools (copilot, cursor, claude code, etc.), even the paid versions, to find the utopia that doubles my productivity where lots of people are talking about. But everytime I find they take more time to generate code than me typing it, they rarely get things right the first time, they produce way more code than needed (which is much more to reason about) and all in all it takes longer to achieve something using “AI” instead of doing it on my own.
The worst results are the ones that seem to be correct, but can only be found incorrect on closer inspection. For instances, a part of my job is to write data collection applications for sensors; those sensors come with a datasheet (usually 100 to 200 pages) that explain how to “talk” to the sensor. Sounds perfect for an LLM - throw the datasheet in, get a small C application out. But either I get something that does not even compile, or something that seems to collect data, but configures the sensor completely wrong. Debugging that takes more time than just working through the datasheet myself and program it myself.
Yeah, my work is forcing us to use Claude for everything now. More than ever, I’m convinced that using AI is slower and worse than me just doing it by hand.
UNLESS, if I blindly accept the output, then Claude is faster. Sure, I can close the ticket in 15 minutes. Is it right? Idk. Is it good? Idk. Does it have bugs? Idk. Did it make shit up? Idk. Did anything even get compiled or tested? Idk. The ticket is closed though and that’s all that matters, apparently.
Well that’s because copilot and cursor are pure shit, and claude code is overpriced and over rated.
TBH I have been hopping between agent frameworks, but mostly I use locally run Qwen or Deepseek to draft individual function blocks or brainstorm in a notepad interface:
And manually insert them as I review the code… I like my stuff uncomplicated and unobstructed.
If I were to pick an API provider today, I’d buy one year of Xiaomi MiMo, because it is dirt cheap and good enough. GLM and Deepseek are great, but more expensive since they are popular now.
find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are
I’ve been reading this for 3 years and all I’ve seen so far is my peers making more work for me by going on wild goose chases and making me wade through slop. I do believe there are ways to use it responsibly and productively but that is definitely not what is happening on average.
I don’t understand why so many people decided to take “LLMs increase productivity” as an axiom instead of using their fucking eyes and looking at what is happening around them.
I think most misplaced critic comes from people not understanding or knowing the different types of AI. Some even hate all types of intelligence it seems.
They did, just on a smaller scale, and they used all games ever played by high-level players. LLMs and image generators were stealing data years before they became viable. And nobody gave a shit.
Let’s not pretend most people give a shit about ethics or the environment. Those were impacted long before AI became viable in any way. People hate on AI because it’s affecting everyday prices and employment. Ethics and environment are just convenient shiny arguments few actually stand behind.
If tomorrow billionaires turned around and said “actually, here’s UBI for everyone, provided by AI!”, most people would be cheering on intellectual theft and destruction of this earth, and call everyone still against it selfish and regressive.
Ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments”?? Go fuck yourself you delusional shill. Praying for a billionaire saviour while gagging on their boots, fuck you.
You conflate one type of AI with all the other ones. Call it LLM or generative AI.
I programmed AI 20 years ago, it still is AI but doesn’t use datacenters. I programmed deep neural networks ten years ago, it did not use datacenters either.
You didn’t pirate the collective works of humanity to train on, while under a society that requires intellectual property rights to ensure those creators are compensated, in order to undercut them twice (once to train and once to replace them)
You didn’t pollute the sky, dry the soil, bulldoze people’s homes to make your chessbot.
You didn’t corner the market on components to brute force the solution to declare yourself computer god, where everyone must come to you for compute.
Gen AI seeks to replace humans and it’s not even sentient. I don’t give a single fuck how useful a fancy algorithm is, it’s not ok with me if it’s designed to destroy my life.
Well do the work and call it for what it is, not just “AI”.
Generative AI.
LLM
Is it truly that hard?
I mean you seem to want to, and thus we can have a discussion about it, which I favour instead of having people just being generally angry it seems.
The day when it doesn’t crush the environment, should we use gen AI to help us in our daily lives? Or should we not? Is there something good in it? Or isn’t it? I’d love seing constructive discussions but they just get globbed by people thinking with their gut it seems. Like if you don’t hate “AI” then you’re pro genocide.
Why should we indulge your hypothetical? They’re actively building fossil fuel powered data centers so it’s not even moving in that direction.
And most tech literate people that are anti-genAI would also prefer if it didn’t completely usurp the term AI or that everything historically called ML got also got sucked in. You’re acting like anti people made that happen but it was the boosters and now AI=chatgpt is in the common lexicon. Nitpicking their language when you obviously know damn well what they mean is just silly.
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.
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.
I think the better analogy is, the advances in rocketry made under hitler were pretty neat and just because Hitler was an evil guy who did evil shit doesn’t mean we should have thrown that away. By all means stop giving money and influence to the big AI companies, but the advances made can still be repurposed.
Yes so of course my actual opinion is a little more nuanced than this. I absolutely see the uses of AI, I won’t deny that. I just fundamentally disagree with the way it is being used right now (by which I mean the gas-turbine-powered datacenters it requires, the noise pollution they create, the unethical/outright illegal acquiring of training data.
If you’re using a local model, whose training did not deprive actual people of huge amounts of water or electricity, and did not use stolen data, I’m all for it. But most people aren’t, they’re using ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever Microsoft is making.
Continuing your analogy, this would be like flying rockets manufactured by the third reich, not other companies using the same technologies.
Will the Tesla be the next Beetle?
“Ai is literally Hitler”
-fediverse user, 2026
I hope you’re joking, but I did explicitly state that was not my intention.
If that’s the only example available that illustrates the point, then you have not spent enough time thinking through your idea.
Do better.
lmao fuck off
Thanks for admitting you haven’t got a legitimate argument.
“I don’t like your example, give me a different one.”
“No.”
“Checkmate libtard. So much for the tolerant left.”
ROFL.
Thanks for admitting you have no idea what you’re talking about. Again.
Maybe you should fully read what you’re looking at before posting next time. I’m not the person you were whining to originally.
It’s a bad look when you can’t even tell who it is you’re talking to. Really makes it seem like you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Wow, just speedrunning Godwin’s Law, aren’t we?
I guess I’m going to go back to work and talk to my five LLM sessions that are working on different tickets.
Wasting all that extra water will certainly teach him a lesson.
Yeah, ethical, environmental, legal and fuck the consumer memory questions aside.
That’s every corp and government in existence.
I remember people being angry at IDEs for making programming too easy and belittling code colourization as for children.
There will always be a crowd that wants everything to stay the way they know it.
Some people still think that digital artists aren’t real artists.
deleted by creator
Conservatives.
How do you measure that?
I am asking because I tried all the AI coding tools (copilot, cursor, claude code, etc.), even the paid versions, to find the utopia that doubles my productivity where lots of people are talking about. But everytime I find they take more time to generate code than me typing it, they rarely get things right the first time, they produce way more code than needed (which is much more to reason about) and all in all it takes longer to achieve something using “AI” instead of doing it on my own.
The worst results are the ones that seem to be correct, but can only be found incorrect on closer inspection. For instances, a part of my job is to write data collection applications for sensors; those sensors come with a datasheet (usually 100 to 200 pages) that explain how to “talk” to the sensor. Sounds perfect for an LLM - throw the datasheet in, get a small C application out. But either I get something that does not even compile, or something that seems to collect data, but configures the sensor completely wrong. Debugging that takes more time than just working through the datasheet myself and program it myself.
Yeah, my work is forcing us to use Claude for everything now. More than ever, I’m convinced that using AI is slower and worse than me just doing it by hand.
UNLESS, if I blindly accept the output, then Claude is faster. Sure, I can close the ticket in 15 minutes. Is it right? Idk. Is it good? Idk. Does it have bugs? Idk. Did it make shit up? Idk. Did anything even get compiled or tested? Idk. The ticket is closed though and that’s all that matters, apparently.
Well that’s because copilot and cursor are pure shit, and claude code is overpriced and over rated.
TBH I have been hopping between agent frameworks, but mostly I use locally run Qwen or Deepseek to draft individual function blocks or brainstorm in a notepad interface:
https://github.com/lmg-anon/mikupad
And manually insert them as I review the code… I like my stuff uncomplicated and unobstructed.
If I were to pick an API provider today, I’d buy one year of Xiaomi MiMo, because it is dirt cheap and good enough. GLM and Deepseek are great, but more expensive since they are popular now.
No, pragmatically speaking, LLMs and in general AI will only make code worse each day.
I’ve been reading this for 3 years and all I’ve seen so far is my peers making more work for me by going on wild goose chases and making me wade through slop. I do believe there are ways to use it responsibly and productively but that is definitely not what is happening on average.
I don’t understand why so many people decided to take “LLMs increase productivity” as an axiom instead of using their fucking eyes and looking at what is happening around them.
I think most misplaced critic comes from people not understanding or knowing the different types of AI. Some even hate all types of intelligence it seems.
Chess engines have been using AI, specifically, neural networks, for years before ChatGPT or other LLMs. Nobody complained.
Chess engines didn’t require data centers that guzzle water and spit out pollution like an 18th century factory.
It’s all about scale, there aren’t billions of chess engine users.
They did, just on a smaller scale, and they used all games ever played by high-level players. LLMs and image generators were stealing data years before they became viable. And nobody gave a shit.
Let’s not pretend most people give a shit about ethics or the environment. Those were impacted long before AI became viable in any way. People hate on AI because it’s affecting everyday prices and employment. Ethics and environment are just convenient shiny arguments few actually stand behind.
If tomorrow billionaires turned around and said “actually, here’s UBI for everyone, provided by AI!”, most people would be cheering on intellectual theft and destruction of this earth, and call everyone still against it selfish and regressive.
Ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments”?? Go fuck yourself you delusional shill. Praying for a billionaire saviour while gagging on their boots, fuck you.
Here we go again!
You conflate one type of AI with all the other ones. Call it LLM or generative AI.
I programmed AI 20 years ago, it still is AI but doesn’t use datacenters. I programmed deep neural networks ten years ago, it did not use datacenters either.
And that’s why no one is opposed to those.
You didn’t pirate the collective works of humanity to train on, while under a society that requires intellectual property rights to ensure those creators are compensated, in order to undercut them twice (once to train and once to replace them)
You didn’t pollute the sky, dry the soil, bulldoze people’s homes to make your chessbot.
You didn’t corner the market on components to brute force the solution to declare yourself computer god, where everyone must come to you for compute.
Gen AI seeks to replace humans and it’s not even sentient. I don’t give a single fuck how useful a fancy algorithm is, it’s not ok with me if it’s designed to destroy my life.
No but we did all that for Taylor swift and Walmart. Hopefully you don’t do anything with any major brands at all.
Well do the work and call it for what it is, not just “AI”.
Generative AI.
LLM
Is it truly that hard?
I mean you seem to want to, and thus we can have a discussion about it, which I favour instead of having people just being generally angry it seems.
The day when it doesn’t crush the environment, should we use gen AI to help us in our daily lives? Or should we not? Is there something good in it? Or isn’t it? I’d love seing constructive discussions but they just get globbed by people thinking with their gut it seems. Like if you don’t hate “AI” then you’re pro genocide.
Sorry for the rant!
Why should we indulge your hypothetical? They’re actively building fossil fuel powered data centers so it’s not even moving in that direction.
And most tech literate people that are anti-genAI would also prefer if it didn’t completely usurp the term AI or that everything historically called ML got also got sucked in. You’re acting like anti people made that happen but it was the boosters and now AI=chatgpt is in the common lexicon. Nitpicking their language when you obviously know damn well what they mean is just silly.
What are you talking about?
Chess using neural nets didn’t happen until around 2017 with Alpha Zero, based on Google DeepMind.
Ie… Two years after OpenAI was founded. ChatGPT is part of the exact same tech rush.
Nobody complained because chess is harmless, ChatGPT is not 🤷