Torvalds: AI Is the New Compiler, Not the New Programmer

I wish more would listen.

Many seem to interpret the headline as “Torvalds is an AI Bro now,” when its more like him yelling “If you all don’t treat these things as tools, shit is going to hit the fan.”

After seeing what happened to windows because of this “tool” I think many of us are rightfully skeptical of what will happen to this community.

It happened before, why are we okay with it happening again?

Microsoft doesn’t treat it as a tool; that’s the problem.

…Which isn’t surprising. Not only because Microsoft is Microsoft, but they own like a third of OpenAI, so they have a vested interest in perpetuating the AI hype.

Microsoft has far more people relying on their products to work, so you’d think they’d exercise far more diligence in making things work…

Well… Microsoft is Microsoft.

This is what they do. They simply cannot help themselves.

It honestly makes me distrust the whole move because you would genuinely think that if the world depends on your stuff to work you would make it work, AI or not.

We’re still talking about Microsoft, right?

They have a looooong history of enshittification and footgunning that predates “AI” by decades, no matter how much the world has depended on their stuff. So no, I suppose I wouldn’t think that, as that would break decades of precedence for MS. But I suppose I never trusted them in the first place.

It’s strange to me because well, I was a 20+ years windows veteran who managed to never have issues on any of my windows installs prior to the last couple years when the ai thing went full swing. maybe part of that was me, because I was inattentive and reckless, but it really just became too much to ignore. i have a genuinely hard time with the idea of essentially retconning the way things always used to Just Work for me in my Windows days. maybe it was bad when I was there and I just didn’t notice. but blegh.

MS’s antics extend well beyond Windows, unfortunately. There are long blogs and writeups dedicated to it.

But what you said is also kinda true. 7 and XP worked reasonably well as long as you didn’t mess with them, push their bounds too much, or use them for anything “weird.” But you also probably missed a lot of dysfunction in the background.

I’m not trying to shill for Windows 7/XP era OSX or linux or anything either. But Windows has always been kinda notorious.

I never really got into OS modding until recently, so that could be why everything felt smooth until the end. Looking back I suspect a lot of my good experience chalked down to luck.