So what would many anti-AI people say, now that critical infrastructure (Linux, OpenSSL, systemd, MariaDB, and so on) is AI-assisted?
You gotta understand that not all people fall neatly into the black/white sockets of culture wars, your life will be better after that.<p>Many of us don't criticize the use of AI, but the MISUSE/ABUSE of it. It's one perfectly valid use case to let it generate code, and do a manual code review to make sure all of it is solid. It's the lowest of the low as a developer to ask it for a complex program, do a superficial review, and ship it claiming you did it.
Judging by comments on HN over the past month, a lot of people do fall into black/white thinking about AI. I frequently see a kneejerk rejection of the idea that AI could be useful in any context ever. I also see the opposite extreme, refusing to acknowledge any downsides or limitations of AI. Most people fall somewhere in the middle, but I think the parent is referring specifically to the "anti-AI online crowd", which is unfortunately quite extreme in their beliefs.
There were many civilizations in the past that eagerly dug their own graves, to great success.
It's not really clear what this response has to do with the parent comment, or even what point you're making. Are you saying that if we use AI in core infrastructure projects that it's going to cause the downfall of civilization?
Clearly his analogy is about the usage of AI causing a downfall in the project itself. Maybe no one can understand the project anymore after thousands of AI commits. Maybe no one can contribute without having access to some fancy AI provider. Maybe the AI was using you, the developer, as a tool all along and the end game is for your project (and other FOSS projects) to be replicated under the tutelage of a few big corporations, making all FOSS projects irrelevant.
I don't think it's clear that it was an analogy at all. It sounded like a forecast of the collapse of civilization. Even if the claim is narrower, what you're saying is a prediction that can be tested against reality. It doesn't seem likely that a project like Linux, with strong leadership and expert eyes on every change, will fail because of a few AI commits. I suspect reality is a lot less catastrophic and a lot more mundane, and we see a small productivity increase while the project continues more or less as usual.
Prob at a slower rate than the ones against innovation
Like which? Name some civilizations that eagerly dug their own graves
I, too, have this question for the anti-AI people.<p>What is the game plan? Use an OS version older than 2023? Stop using tech?
"NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OS" (<a href="https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/10/13/netbsd-may-have-found-a-new-role-the-ai-free-foss-os/5302818" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/10/13/netbsd-m...</a>)
Adapt to the times, use AI as a tool, not as a colleague.
Those are valid options.
Like linux is some bastion of security or something... I'm everyday more convinced that the reason why linux was let to dominate the server side with no contestation was so that the USA spy network could be done without compromising american companies. This is just the follow up of the same plan.
Some people have a hard time admitting a that a few GPUs can outperform them.<p>I was one of those people. Weren't we all?
Outperform? Where would those GPUs have been without Linus' prompting? Driving a car consists of brutally simple movements critically orchestrated. This isn't a GPU outperforming Linus Torvalds, it's Linus Torvalds engaging with yet another higher cybernetic order.
I think a lot of people are stuck in 2023 when thinking about AI quality. It's gotten so much better that it's basically a totally different product now.<p>It isn't perfect, but it's certainly useful.
A couple of days ago we had these flow of Rust based "reimplementation" of Adobe and Microsoft applications. A lot of people couldn't get past the "yeah but it's full of bugs, it's just SlopWare" opinion.<p>These people couldn't see the forest. The writing is on the wall, that Slopware is the WORST it will ever be. 1 year ago that was unimaginable. Next year, the quality of the developed software will be way better.<p>Selling "code" or "apps" is dead. My wife works in Workday and I've told her to sell as much stock as she can, because there will be an "inflection point" where ALL software based companies will collapse. The same way as Silicon Graphics, Sun , DEC and similar companies collapsed (along with a bit of IBM and HP, who pivoted) with the rise of PC power. Salesforce, SAP, Workday and all smaller companies that sell generic software will fall down.
I think the contributing factor is people who make software but have no idea what they're doing. They want to make photoshop, but they have no knowledge of photo manipulation or how photoshop works, or any software engineering/development practices. And then we wonder why slop still exists. I am of the opinion that it will always exist: people just have no idea what they want to make let alone how they want to work. "Reimplement photoshop" is a nice end-goal, but you have to actually know to a decent degree how photoshop actually works! Not to mention the reverse engineering knowledge you need
Its just inertia of people refusing to update their priors. Two years ago, most LLMs were producing absolute garbage. Even the 70b Llama 3 model would produce nonsense that wouldn't compile, make up completely imaginary API endpoints, and fail to write basic syntax. Then a year ago with Sonnet 4, we actually had something that actually worked, but needed a lot of hand holding for complex tasks. Today, they can be run with minimal supervision. By this time next year, we're going to see the hockey-stick part of the singularity really take off.
Certain people are easily outperformed.
They would say that it occurs at the behest of the Linux Foundation and get flagged.
Move to OpenBSD or even more not "AI", NetBSD :)
“Anti-AI” is anyone who reads code nowadays apparently so it’s about as relevant as if an IDE was used to edit the source code.
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
First you'd have to define what an anti-AI person is. I'm quite bearish on AI, still use it myself, and I say "big whoop." Is this supposed to be some resounding, decisive shot in the pro-AI, anti-AI war?
There's always GNU Hurd and Emacs...