That is not what slop means. It's not ai slop if the developers understand the code and know exactly what they doing, audit everything.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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Actually, I just discovered, the person who wrote this bullshit article is the first to submit it in the crosspost.
And he's banning people from the community who ask questions about it.. Or point out it's bad info lol, so, it seems obvious its more about attention than proper journalism
Why are you banning people who dispute your claims. Everyone should be downvoting the cross posted article with a passion. He's running a dictatorship (basically seems like another "madthumbs")
For anyone who wants to see how comprehensive the oversight is on Kernel development: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-patches.html
But yeah, patches don't go straight to Linus or straight to master, and, it certainly doesn't get approved automatically by an LLM or anything like that. If you're lucky after the initial reviews, they almost certainly go to other testing trees first (and generally multiple). Then you also have staging branches, etc.
For anyone curious how comprehensive the process is, the real info is in https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-patches.html
Linus is saying that using an LLM doesn't absolve you of taking responsibility for what you publish.
I am extremely anti-LLM for basically everything but even I can see this moral panic for what it is. Sadly not the first time David Gerard (the author of this blog) has fallen into it.
But all AI output is slop. It’s social spam. That’s what it’s for. It’s slop! Say “slop” every time
This writing is far, far too emotional to be considered anything but an opinion piece
This dude has been pushing this schtick for a long time, seems to just be trying to pander to the anti AI crowd for clicks, never has anything meaningful to say.
sir this is a blog post
It’s so weirdly emotional that I’m sure I’m saving some folks the click
do people not see the url? the tagline? the smug clippy?
Ctrl-F "slop" - 32 matches
You know how we call AI output "slop" because it's low-effort and kinda generic? Yeah.
Lmao at this completely misguided comment.
Torvalds’s first publicly released chatbot code was in January this year, when he vibe-coded a project in Python because he didn’t know enough Python. The programming language kids learn in high school. The guy who runs the kernel couldn’t get his head around Python.
Linus would run circles around whoever wrote this article. Ever hear of "domain knowledge"? It's perfectly reasonable to expect an old school engineer well-versed in low level code like C to see high level scripting languages like python as fairly alien.
I think you are the misguided one. Even Linus says devs should be able to understand what they generate. Him giving in and slopping something up is direct evidence of his supposed morals already slipping...
… If you are a competent developer, he said, an LLM makes a great tool, but only after that effort has been put in to set it up. He resisted suggestions to post his LLM-training materials, saying that each developer needs to go through that process separately.
This is the vibe-code-two-step. "AI" is useful because it helps inexperienced users to code. But you also have to be an expert to use it properly.
AI is useful when you can put it to a task and validate the result.
For many tasks that’s visually seeing a button you can click.
For other tasks you need to be an expert to get value from it and really understand.
If you provide tools and context, you get a lot better results. For most of my core uses I’ve built decent tooling, but I wouldn’t want to share or be responsible for maintaining that for everyone else.
I genuinely don’t think it’s useful for learning unless used like stack overflow, but it’s not designed or trained to do that, it’s trained to take the drivers seat regardless of instructions.
Same thing could be said about a fishing pole. Or car, or rifle, or a bicycle.
It helps inexperienced users to catch fish.... But with some knowledge and experience can get more out of it.
Not the same at all. You don't have to be a gunsmith to kill someone with a gun. You do have to be a knowledgeable engineer to produce anything that isn't slop with "AI".
A MUCH better analogy is construction. Do you want a bunch of teenagers and Main Character Syndrome dipshits who cannot even read blueprints nor understand regulations and building codes let alone know them, to build your house? Nono, it's OK! They have nail guns and modern lumber, they don't need to know all that!
Sure you can get a shed or even a small house out of that, but you're never going to get safe, modern, multistory construction like that...
It's a tool, not a product.
There's no such thing as 'just a tool', especially if that tool is accelerating climate change when we're already on the knife's edge of irreversible domino effects.
Sounds like y'all are afraid, just like the HVAC guys and the mini splits.
Also sounds like that writer needs to learn to use a fork.
You do realize that all code for the kernel is code reviewed and tested by so many people right? The patches are probably some of the most human reviewed code on the planet....
This feels like the time when every armchair expert became experts on immunology...
The article is literally about how they have so much AI slop that the code is no longer reviewed by people it’s reviewed by a Meta chatbot…
Can you post the quote where it says that it's untested and it goes straight to master
I'm lost.
Also, looking through the authors articles, frankly, the list looks like low quality human slop.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/other.html
And I can't find any evidence they're actually involved with any development projects either. Literally ANY projects including stupid little pet ones every dev has
I mean, having pet projects doesn't require being "involved" with one nor requires making anything public...
Except I can't see any references to this guy getting involved with any projects at all at a technical level.
If you check his articles, he's definitely targeting a specific crowd based on what I can see too.
Saying "there is an AI bot that identifies if code is obviously bad" doesn't really make an exciting story though...
The article is one angry person's rant and you are further going beyond what it actually says.
Yeah. Pretty much.
The actual policy is that it all gets reviewed by a human I think when I was looking into it.
The bots are likely most useful to reject obviously bad patches which have obvious bugs or don't follow guidelines. And identifying bad code is something which AI tends to be good at.
In our code at work, we use weakly typed languages which aren't strict and on those it tends to be even better. We catch things like table keys that are typed wrong, etc. On C, things like pointers it probably does a good job with identifying as wrong
If it passes AI code review it still gets checked by human for things that are wrong and needs fixing. But if it fails, it probably needs fixing regardless.
A good language server / ide will also complain about incorrect types. That specific example is a deterministic process, no llm is required for it at all.
We do use one. But, in practice, they can't catch a lot of things which AI will
At least in our case too based on what's available, it also can't check stuff like coding style well (but our development relies on that less).
Some might though
Well fuck off back to Windows then (I'm sure you can determine whether or not the code for that has been near an LLM... oh wait). Or fork it, if you can. If neither of those stop being so entitled about what tools someone uses to build the OS they give you for free!
"You don't like Trump? Well maybe you should go back to the middle ages. Or just go and make a new country, see if that's so easy, huh"
Since when is the argument of "other things are even worse so we shouldn't care about something becoming worse" a thing?
Nevermind, don't answer that, as usual the answer is "Since the rise of the 'AI' cult"
The people moaning about AI though rarely even contribute to anything. Slop is basically the same as "woke" and when I've asked people who go Lemmy post to Lemmy post to show the slop, the best they can do is just point to the agents.md file. It's never a real technical reason.
I can't find any evidence online the guy who wrote this article has contributed code to ANY project. And he seems to write human slop articles if you look at this history (EDIT: The guy who wrote the article is the crossposter. And, he's just blatantly banning anyone who disagrees without debate, and then after banning them, people attack them)
Even worse, the article is bullshit anyway, because all code on the kernel is reviewed by a human, and it goes through multiple levels. It doesn't filter straight through a bot to master
Also, things aren't getting worse. If you check the kernel 7.4 performance improvements, many are attributed to AI, including a recent optimisation (which was reviewed by human and cleaned up) to speed up kernel compiling down to approximately 10s apparently.
I don't is hidden the AI code, but having a human to blame for the AI code if that code broke something.