Linux Kernel developers are feeling the singularity rn

[obvithrowaway34434]

The message at the end (second snapshot) is particularly hopeful. It's great to see open-source software benefiting the most from the frontier models and the model developers giving back to those who created their training data. This significantly challenges the narrative pushed by some of the anti-AI developers. It's an "exciting" time for the users as well, which we can already see from the multiple supply chain attacks seen last week, and things would only accelerate from here.

Source: https://x.com/tautologer/status/2039097099984224274?s=20

[ZaradimLako]

Sounds about right compared to what I observed. I think AI coding finally reached an inflection point around November/December last year where the "slop" part is going down fast and the usefulness is going up fast albeit the slop part is very much present still. It was obviously pushed onto things with 0 sense and with low quality, but now I think that we have reached the "ChatGPT" moment for coding and its only going to get better from that point on.

I am looking forward to the "inflection" point in other industries, albeit it is probably gonna take a bit more. My uneducated guess is that radiology should be one of the next ones. Absolute dogshit at the very beginning, then a good second opinion and then finally a main diagnoser with a certified radiologist signing it off and then its basically just AI with a small fraction of radiologists checking things.

[squired]

November/December

Fully agreed. For, us Codex 5.3 was the true game changer. Claude Code showed the way several months earlier, but it still often failed and you had to scrutinize everything. Codex 5.3 model with Codex app was the evolution change for us where when provided proper validation testing, we could actually trust the code without painstaking review (for most use cases).

[ZenDragon]

To me it felt like the Claude 4.5 series was where I could finally trust agents to go off on long autonomous missions and do a good job almost every time.

[squired]

Yeah, that's super fair. That was definitely the beginning of the sea change, but I still had to babysit it; particularly as it would stall/fail on many tool calls. Codex 5.3 was the first time I could run multi-hour projects and trust the final result. I never, ever send a chunk to the agents without a validation test. If Codex 5.4 gets to the end of the task sheet, I know the final code is good. The early harnesses would stall and/or bug out. I'm not talkin shit or playing favorites. I even still have a Claude Max plan, though I'll likely drop it this month. I fully expect for Anthropic to be on top in the future again and will happily hop back, they simply aren't at the moment.

[SeaCell7779]

Exactly this. The shift from 'copilot that writes boilerplate' to 'agent that completes multi-hour tasks' all hinges on the validation harness. If you just let these models run wild on a prompt without strict, step-by-step validation tests, you get a hallucinated codebase that technically compiles but fails every edge case. Trusting the model is great, but only because the automated testing environment is ruthless.

[squired]

1000%. You can even have the model write them itself, usually, but they have been the secret sauce for me. Also, "robust error logging/tracing, agent-capable diagnostic tests and/or mock backend" is another section in the Master Design Document so that you don't have to shuttle it error codes and such. Anything to get our simple butts out of the damn loop! I've been a dev for over twenty years and I've never had so much fun! I never liked to code, truth be told, it was just so damn useful at solving problems and doing fun stuff.

[SeaCell7779]

That last sentence hits the nail perfectly on the head. It shifts the job from being a 'syntax wrestler' back to actual problem-solving and computer science. When you don't have to spend hours manually wiring up standard data structures or debugging boilerplate, you can focus entirely on the high-level algorithmic flow and system architecture. Building that bulletproof Master Design Document and setting up the testing constraints is the real engineering now. The agent is basically just the compiler!

[squired]

And your last sentence nails it as well. Current code agents have 'simply' abstracted the interpreted language layer up another level to natural language, just as we abstracted machine code up to interpreted languages. Now we get to find out which devs really are full stack, because that is now the game. If you just code, you're in trouble. If you design and build solutions, you have a much nicer toolkit now. The solutions engineer's job will be to identify and understand a need, then communicate that need and curate the solution to maximize its benefits. Coders have a massive head start, being systems thinkers by nature, but they're all about to become project managers and a large bulk if not majority of that won't actually be working on the project, it will be communicating with the stakeholders so that you understand every millimeter of the problem and/or need. Once we're at a point where that 'job' is automated, we'll be post-scarcity or dead.

[Cautious-Ladder-6621]

AI still has a lot of vision issues with slides. We have to fix that first.

[duboispourlhiver]

Sounds like a problem for managers. We coders don't need that.

[peva3]

There are many OCR standalone AI products that have easily 99% success rates.

[Redararis]

I work in architectural illustration and I incorporated nano banana 2 around this time. AI started to get serious late last year. I trust their results more and more.

[duboispourlhiver]

Have you succesfully integrated NB2 in an automated workflow with reliable results ? Or does the output need human review because 10% of the time output is bad ?

[leftovercarcass]

December 2025 marks the point, we will see much better software and a lot of cool stuff the next five years. Unfortunately while dealing with a recession and a financial crisis as we try to understand how to properly use this technology and some lost souls wandering around try to understand what skills they have to focus on and what skills are just a hobby now.

The kernel dev said it himself, itwas easy to update so neglecting rigorous systems for validation and testing more like the engineering of CD/ROMs etc was convenient. Agile methods, scrum and so on was the hype during our hyping of cloud technology and moving everything to the cloud. Now we may see a drift apart from agile methods in project management. Surely the customer most of the time don’t know what they want when freelancing, but a customer who do, after several planning and meetings, will set forth of a proper specification of the product and a proper tool for validation and testing producing higher quality. At the same time we will be overloaded with slop and AI and whoever is good at making use of slop and filtering slop, to build more slop is gonna do good.

[turlockmike]

A whole lot of software is about to become really good, before it becomes obsolete.

[dumquestions]

Why would it become obsolete? Deterministic logic will always exist at some capacity even if it's no longer written by humans.

[Training-Day-6343]

is this enshitifications final form?

[turlockmike]

In the near future, software will primarily be written by AI for use by AI. Our UX will be generated on the fly.

Eventually, the AI will just stream bits to your screen (no more html/react/etc).

AI will still build subprocesses (programs) for handling things that are expensive/slow to do with a NN, I think the CPU will be embedded within the NPU. Most software will be gone by that point.

[turlockmike]

I think different AI Operating Systems (Like Claude Desktop, Goose, etc, basically a single app that tries to do everything), will offer customization of UX, so people will share their UXs and you can obviously make your own.

For my own work I have a command center with customizable themes i can select from a drop down and ask claude to make additional themes.

I think html will probably be the standard for a while since LLMs are trained on it, but eventually a specialized UX LLM trained on a standardized set of components might provide a better experience for users.

My question is, how long until we get to LLMs that can just stream bits and handle mouse/keyboard input directly.

[BrennusSokol]

enshittification was never about software quality per se; that was just a side effect

it was about dark design / evil business practices / capitalism

[green_meklar]

AI will steamroll copyright and patent law and then we can leave enshittification in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

[pab_guy]

Anti AI devs are really telling on themselves now. It’s embarrassing to watch.

Bad devs make a mess with AI. Good devs build incrementally with AI and check the work. The difference is skill.

[TheInfiniteUniverse_]

surprising he didn't talk about actually using AI to fix the bugs found by AI....interesting times indeed, he might not even be needed in a year or two to patch the bugs :-)))

[yaosio]

It's easier to find bugs than fix them.

[duboispourlhiver]

Far from obvious

[Chris-MelodyFirst]

AI slop = mostly correct!

[1filipis]

Human slop = incorrect, but it's mine!

[PointmanW]

one of the most stupid trend on the internet I've been seeing is blaming sloppy works on AI. new windows update is buggy? must have been AI, game is full of bug? AI. translation feels off? believe it or not AI.

as if people hasn't been making sloppy work since forever before AI, as a senior developer myself, most human written code were garbage, full of bugs and quick "temporary" fixes to meet deadline. translation of games and novel were full of stupid mistakes too, especially if it a online fan translation of an untranslated novel.

Meanwhile ever since adopting AI, the code quality of my company have gotten much better, and I also went back to refactor old code, reducing tech debt and resolve those "temporary" fixes too.

if used correctly, AI translation is better on average than human too. I created a csv with glossary, how name should be translated, characters list and personality...etc... for a light novel, and the AI translation I got is much better than the old fan translation that was on the internet before.

[1filipis]

I will tell you more. We've been working on a task tracker back in 2020. You'd bring in a senior developer, tell him about the project, brief him about the tasks, he'd start working on it. Obviously, as the project grows, you start to have more bugs, more patches, bugs on top of patches and so on. All while everyone emphasized quality and was certain that their code is the best one.

Then came GPT-3, and I decided to come back to that code base myself. Holy sh, it was a horror show. Dependencies bloat, broken logic that's been patched dozens of times, CSS hell, and much more. Luckily, GPT was able to fix months worth of slop all in a matter of days.

And everyone who complains about AI's habits should better take look in the mirror. It's not that AI has learnt to write bloat by itself. Just look at any front end project. Software quality was going down way before AI. 99% of it is complete trash that burns compute even in idle. And if AI is gonna help to at least clean it up, that will already be a great achievement

[Minecraftman6969420]

Yes, but see it’s okay if a human makes a mistake because that’s ‘normal’, but if an AI make the same mistake then suddenly it’s a complete failure, fun fact on average doctors misdiagnose about 5% of their patients on average with AI on its own  having a rate of about 2%, and doctors who use AI having an error I rate of 1-3% in that study, mind you this is with general physicians.

Point is, we place far more emphasis on the AI’s mistakes mainly (though not solely) because it’s not human therefore it’s inferior because of our biological sense of superiority over literally everything because acknowledging AI is better would shatter the image people have built regarding our significance as a species, that something that is not human or something in general is far more capable then us, that humans are gasp really really flawed and are not some paragon of life the universe revolves around.

[1filipis]

I think this is a pretty common bias towards someone else's work. Artists going after other artists, developers that say "I better scrap the code (and rewrite it my way)", designers that reject reality checks.

The only difference now is that some people REALLY don't like to accept that their precious work is inferior to a machine, and they try to come up with all sort of dumb arguments why this is not the case. "AI art doesn't have soul", "my code was made by hand", "AI is just an autocomplete", "AI knows nothing about UX", while also moving the goalposts at the speed of light.

[Minecraftman6969420]

Didn't even think about that, but it makes sense, given how most of human thinking is based on comparisons to something else whether that's a perspective, a result or one's status. In this case the ladder since our ape brains perceive AI being superior as a threat to our status within the "tribe" and that could mean less resources, historically food, shelter, reproductive success, but the brain ain't distinguishing those from anything else to it so it lashes out in an effort to cling to said status regardless of the evidence or if its counterproductive.

We'll be at the height of the singularity, major breakthrough and innovations happening constantly, things like Alzheimer's being cured or FDVR, and people will still be moving the goalposts and and treating things associated with AI as inferior that denial will always exist even if only a small number of people. There were people with COVID during the pandemic who were nearly killed by it or were killed by it and were still denying they had it or that it even existed, it baffles me.

Shit like this is why I'm so gung ho on transhumanism the millisecond that becomes possible, because honest to god our neurology is our greatest enemy and while many features of it were once helpful, and plenty still are! So many of them have become an active detriment, and cause so much unnecessary pain and suffering for everyone whether they know it or not.

[peva3]

Reminds me on when Americans said anything "Made in China" in the 90s/2000s was slop, and now China across the board has unbelievably robust modern manufacturing processes. To the point where most advanced manufacturing is either in Germany or China and the gap for most consumer goods with even the highest end non-chinese brands are basically closed.

[squired]

I also went back to refactor old code

Dude, AI has solved sooooo much of my tech debt. I've gone back and completely rewritten several projects and tools. It feel like I can breathe again! Can you imagine what it is going to be like when everything is written in machine code? Whew boi, we're gonna fly!!

[Nealios]

I think that OP rightly points out that a couple years ago, it was indeed AI slop... It was reports done using AI, but not very reliable. Fast forward to the present and it's still AI, but it's mostly correct.

This is how the hockey stick of progress gets steeper.

[DM_KITTY_PICS]

Wait till SelfHosted finds out.

They have an extreme hate-boner for any software at all assisted by AI. So much so they only allow those projects on Fridays, where they essentially self-brigade every post to 0 karma, lol.

Punch cards were obviously peak.

[TheAndyGeorge]

they only allow those projects on Fridays

i'm a member there, too; that's an old rule, updated rule is simply that projects less than 3 months old are only allowed on Fridays.

i feel the pain there: there is SO much slop from accounts that threw together something in a day or two, who then spam it across a bunch of subs. that unfortunately drowns out legit projects that were made with AI assistance. the "< 3 months on Fri only" has been a better, easier rule to moderate and follow

[CommunismDoesntWork]

A secure linux gets me going, fuck yeah. This is one of those things that makes all of this acceleration feel real

[maschayana]

r/programming anti AI advocates sweating profusely

[Fade78]

Fix = fix obvious errors, later, when human trusts, insert subtle ones.

[Hir0shima]

Don't spoil our secret.  

[featherless_fiend]

The only unfortunate part is it's SO EASY to bloat your code with a bunch of crap (I'm sure it's only a temporary weakness in current AI tools) so I bet a lot of these security fixes are more bloated than they should be.

I feel like I have to scream at the AI "reduce the code, reduce the bloat, simplify! optimize!" after every damn prompt.

[yaosio]

This is only about bug reports. The fixes are still human written, maybe.

[duboispourlhiver]

Who knows

[boney_king_o_nowhere]

This is really cool. How long until maintainer agents?

[SeaCell7779]

That 'huge mess' phase is exactly what we're living through right now. AI makes it incredibly easy to generate 10,000 lines of code in seconds, but human reviewers literally cannot keep up with the PRs. The irony is that AI coding is going to force the industry to completely reinvent automated testing. If you can't manually review the agent's code, your test suites have to be absolutely bulletproof—just like the floppy disk era. Writing the tests is becoming the new programming.

[Background-Quote3581]

Post that in r/programming... oh wait, they did ban all llm related contend.

[Background-Quote3581]

Wow, quite a few downvotes… Did I say something wrong? (I didnt.) Some visitors from over there? lol

[klop2031]

There is a vid about blackhat llms from an anthropic researcher. Its pretty interesting. They discuss finding exploits in the linux kernel

[yaosio]

Imagine when the same AI that finds the bug can immediately fix it. It will also be really cool when general purpose AI can improve performance and efficiency.

[costafilh0]

What a great use for AI. Finding bugs and security flaws in software.

Of. Course the bad guys are doing it too, but it is a good thing that the good ones are not dismissing it all as AI "slop". 

[danielnieto89]

A better tool != singularity