Being Linux Torvalds

boesboes

pff, i'm getting a bit tired of this endless bullshit from antirez tbh. No we are not linus now, LLMs are not humans, agents don't think, don't 'know' when they fuck up. Even making the comparison is just disrespectful to everyone involved

epolanski

It's an interesting point, but at the same time there are benefits to human contributions being slower paced. Not only that, Linus was not immediately overwhelmed by external contributions but had the time to become intimate with the project and its evolution. While I get what Antirez is saying, and I see why it can work and scale for him, there's a bit of nuance missing: everything he says it's true, as long as you, the coder, actually spend a lot of time studying and planning what you want to achieve as you iterate. Which, coincidentally, it's what Antirez himself did both for DwarfStar or Redis Arrays. He spent a gargantuan amount of time before he wrote a single line of code till he could largely explain the system, the design choices and their tensions.

bad_username

> We are Linus, now Now, when we program with the artificial intelligences, we are exactly that same thing. We are Linus Torvalds, not always with the talent that he has, but the role we should assume, in the projects where we don't do the review of every line of the code, is exactly of that type. It is exactly the role that he has. I am not familiar with the Linux contributor ecosystem. But I am not sure it is valid to compare a human contributor to Linux to an AI agent. By "I am not sure" I really mean I am not sure; maybe it is valid nowadays? Successful Linux maintainers are the cream of the crop; can even the modern LLMs compare at all? OTOH, Linux is so popular that it attracted lots of slop even before LLM explosion. And LLMs are so much easier to reason with than humans (I do believe that).I don't know... food for thought.