Didn't Linus say he stopped coding a while ago, or at least coding the kernel, and mainly reviews and manages the codebase now? Whether the code comes from a machine or a human, perhaps it matters little to how he's been working for a while.
It's interesting that although I guess he reviewed this LLM generated code, the human review found a race condition.
I use AI like most software people do nowadays, but I have to admit that I'm a little surprised that Linus is onboard with it. He always felt like one of the last "old school" developers...he wouldn't even touch C++!
Linus's policy on patch acceptance covers the LLM problem: it must still be audited by a maintainer before acceptance (and thus, actually be decent code), but also, because of LLMs, be significantly produced by a human, as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.
Nobody is really against LLMs producing, for example, exploits for novel security bugs to assist security researchers in patching those bugs. The exploit itself does not need to be Copyrightable nor Open Source. Nor is anybody against LLMs accelerating debugging, and helping find the location and root cause of the bug; again, that is not producing the end product code, thus does not need to be Copyrightable nor Open Source.
> because of LLMs, be significantly produced by a human, as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.
...that's not how copyright works. You can't poison an open source project with code that's fully and unreservedly in the public domain, if that precedent stands for much longer and if that precedent is applied to software in a way that's even vaguely analagous to how it's applied to things that judges sorta kinda understand.
If I'm not mistaking, you can put public domain or at least BSD/MIT code into the Linus kernel which is licensed under GPLv2. Other people are then free to use that specific code under that specific license instead of GPLv2.
Also, Linus Torvalds wrote long time ago some simple assembly routines which are public domain.
He didn't refuse to add C++ to the kernel because he is "old school". He had a list of valid criticisms. Your comment makes it sound like his refusal to use C++ was ideology-driven and not technically-sound, and that therefore he is vulnerable to making other not technically-sound decisions such as a complete refusal to use AI.
I recently attended an academic computer science conference. Several people I have looked up to my entire life were there, which also gives you an idea of their age (I am 40). They're all using AI. They are not mindless boosters about it, but clearly find it a useful tool in the toolbox.
I would guess Linus has reviewed more code than anyone else in the world, so in that sense I'm not that surprised.
I also don't think the C++ thing was out of a stubbornness for the old way of doing things, but had concrete reasons to reject it. I guess it was a little of both maybe 20 years ago.
Stephen Wolfram also looks favorable to using AI in programming and he has been programming a lot. I guess the context of how these tool are used is the important part here.
Didn't Linus say he stopped coding a while ago, or at least coding the kernel, and mainly reviews and manages the codebase now? Whether the code comes from a machine or a human, perhaps it matters little to how he's been working for a while.
It's interesting that although I guess he reviewed this LLM generated code, the human review found a race condition.
Yes.
He is now the leader of a cabal of maintainers, and the only coding he does now is minor fixups for branch merging.
I suspect he still codes his own pet projects in his off time though, that's how we got git after all.
we got git 21 years ago.
git was good to get got. I hope something is annoying Linus as much these days as source control was then. I appreciate the way he solves problems.
I believe his last one was scuba diving software
So what would many anti-AI people say, now that critical infrastructure (Linux, OpenSSL, systemd, MariaDB, and so on) is AI-assisted?
They would say that it occurs at the behest of the Linux Foundation and get flagged.
I use AI like most software people do nowadays, but I have to admit that I'm a little surprised that Linus is onboard with it. He always felt like one of the last "old school" developers...he wouldn't even touch C++!
Linus's policy on patch acceptance covers the LLM problem: it must still be audited by a maintainer before acceptance (and thus, actually be decent code), but also, because of LLMs, be significantly produced by a human, as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.
Nobody is really against LLMs producing, for example, exploits for novel security bugs to assist security researchers in patching those bugs. The exploit itself does not need to be Copyrightable nor Open Source. Nor is anybody against LLMs accelerating debugging, and helping find the location and root cause of the bug; again, that is not producing the end product code, thus does not need to be Copyrightable nor Open Source.
> as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source
Including CC0 works as parts of works licensed in other ways is perfectly fine iirc? It's like WTFPL after all.
* should be everyone's policy
> because of LLMs, be significantly produced by a human, as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.
...that's not how copyright works. You can't poison an open source project with code that's fully and unreservedly in the public domain, if that precedent stands for much longer and if that precedent is applied to software in a way that's even vaguely analagous to how it's applied to things that judges sorta kinda understand.
If I'm not mistaking, you can put public domain or at least BSD/MIT code into the Linus kernel which is licensed under GPLv2. Other people are then free to use that specific code under that specific license instead of GPLv2.
Also, Linus Torvalds wrote long time ago some simple assembly routines which are public domain.
He didn't refuse to add C++ to the kernel because he is "old school". He had a list of valid criticisms. Your comment makes it sound like his refusal to use C++ was ideology-driven and not technically-sound, and that therefore he is vulnerable to making other not technically-sound decisions such as a complete refusal to use AI.
I recently attended an academic computer science conference. Several people I have looked up to my entire life were there, which also gives you an idea of their age (I am 40). They're all using AI. They are not mindless boosters about it, but clearly find it a useful tool in the toolbox.
I would guess Linus has reviewed more code than anyone else in the world, so in that sense I'm not that surprised.
I also don't think the C++ thing was out of a stubbornness for the old way of doing things, but had concrete reasons to reject it. I guess it was a little of both maybe 20 years ago.
But there's Rust in the kernel now too.
Stephen Wolfram also looks favorable to using AI in programming and he has been programming a lot. I guess the context of how these tool are used is the important part here.
He could have at least written the commit messages himself. That llm yapping is annoying to read.
Srsly
When you do it, its slop. When I do it? Its craftsmanship.
So many people's take away from this story is that Linus used Claude to improve the Kernel therefore anyone can.