Growing Proportion of Linux Commits Being Made by LLMs Not a Sign of LLMs Working, It's a Sign of Linux Development Being Shifted From Community to GAFAM and Other Slop Pushers
Why a slop antagonist became apologist (follow the money, the boss, including the 'Linux' Foundation)
The ambitious, eternally-elusive fantasy or Utopia of code that 'writes itself' is a lot like centuries-old fantasies about self-replicating machines. We're hardly there; it's "proof of concept"... at best. Code that reviews itself is typically false marketing, an exaggeration. Brute force (fuzzing, finding edge cases etc.) is not intelligence, it's a waste of electricity and, in general, mediocrity. It tries to compensate for "Expensive Workers" who can do the job a lot better. It's not a technical solution, it's an economic, subpar pseudo-solution.
There are false assumptions aplenty.
There are statistics available out there about more and more code in Linux being "assisted" (produced) by LLMs. Days ago Linus Torvalds said it was probably the largest rc (not merge window) in years and we can be sure a lot of the code was audited by zero humans, not just a single human (the coder/author).
Years ago and even more than a decades ago headlines said that developing Linux became a good/decent paying job. In reality, that's not what they were asserting or explaining. What they meant to say was, those who still developed or contributed to Linux were not like Con Kolivas [1, 2] but instead large corporations participating to their own advantage (self-service and/or self-serving changes, sometimes to benefit opponents of Linux).
Now that more patches are made with LLMs it is crucial to remind ourselves that in GAFAM there is often a mandate for developers to use LLMs, even if they absolutely reject LLMs, find them morally abhorrent, and refuse on some other grounds. They'd lose the job for declining. So this does not show LLMs are potent.
This shows: 1) large companies force workers to use LLMs (a decision often made by non-programmers who have no idea what "technical debt" means). 2) large companies have replaced or displaced a development community, instead we have a workforce of companies that "help themselves" into Linux to add TPMs, DRM, and all sorts of other junk. █