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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don't know why you're getting hammered here. There's a clear skill factor in piloting LLMs.

Srsly

They would say that it occurs at the behest of the Linux Foundation and get flagged.

Some people have a hard time admitting a that a few GPUs can outperform them.

I was one of those people. Weren't we all?

Fork all of them, work on those manually and compare in a few years. It'll be like mining Bitcoin before you know if it'll take off. If it doesn't, waste of time, if it does, they'll come begging asking you to make machine go again :P

There's always GNU Hurd and Emacs...