So here I am sitting at a communal table in the lobby of the Sonesta Charlotte Lower South End hotel near the end of Southeast Linuxfest 2026 (aka SELF) pondering this weekends experience and I gotta say: It was a bit depressing. Why? Well in 2024 there was one session about AI. Last year there were four sessions that were AI related and those sessions were part of the “Emerging Technologies” track just like in 2024. This year there were seven sessions and they were part of the “Artificial Intelligence” track. Technically that’s only three additional sessions, but I guess this year it officially became impossible for me to escape the feeling that AI is literally everywhere now.
I’ll be blunt: From my perspective, that’s not a good thing. You might be surprised to hear that I actually went to a few of these sessions. Why? Well I believe in trying to understand things, even when I don’t agree with them. Part of me wants somebody to sell me on the idea of this. Make it make sense. Unsurprisingly however, I failed to reach that destination.
I think the most depressing part of this phenomena was ESR’s session entitled “How to Succceed at AI-Assisted Coding Without Really Trying”. The title kind of hints at it, but going into it I didn’t know if it was in jest or not. But as it turns out, he has fully bought into the AI coding trend and went so far as to liken those of us who want to keep writing code by hand to people who still insist on blacksmithing and people who still insist on keeping retro computing alive… and here I was thinking he was still a rational fellow. How awkward.
When pressed about the intellectual property concerns around the reality that these frontier models have been trained on code that wasn’t properly licensed to allow for such a privilege, ESR responded by asking, “Well are you against people learning by reading books? If not, they why are you against LLMs learning by reading code?” I briefly raised my hand to follow up to that. The intended question was, “Yes but when an author who has read somebody else’s work produces that work verbatim or close to, its considered plagiarism. How is this any different?” But I thought better of it as he continued by pointing out (in response to another audience members statement / question) that the people against LLM assisted coding were exactly like the people in the past who were against higher level languages that made coding more accessible as opposed to something like assembly. With that response I could see that ESR had fully gone down the irrational rabbit hole of AI and no words from my mouth were going to change that. So rather than disrupt the session by attempting to mount a serious challenge, I decided to just let it go.
On an aside, I was actually toying with some code that I got inspired to write as a result of some earlier sessions I attended about retro computing, namely around what it takes to create and produce a game that runs on actual Sega Genesis hardware using modern tooling. That session was amazing by the way. In any event that session got me thinking about a recent tiny game idea I had, nothing particularly original but just a way to dip my toe into the pool, and that inspired me not to write the game itself but to write a program to help determine the most optimal solution for the game in question.
By the time I made it into ESR’s session after lunch, I had written a good chunk of code, alas none of it was actually working. However that wasn’t a problem. There were no deadlines, there was no JIRA ticket, there were no story points, there was only the pure joy of doing the thing because I wanted to do the thing. It was a totally pointless and largely theoretical program that, if functioning correctly, would produce the answer to a question that I could literally obtain with less than 30 seconds of search engine work if I really wanted it.
But the answer wasn’t the actual goal. That wasn’t the thing I was focused on. For the first time in years, I actually felt the spark, the urge, the motivation, the compulsion to write pointless code, not for any particularly useful purpose, but solely for the fact that I would enjoy writing it. I cannot tell you how foreign that feeling has become for me and how refreshing it was to experience it again.
Of course after ESRs session, I found myself starting to wonder, “Am I the problem?” With the introduction of that quandary, my progress exploring this little side dimension of computing joy came to an abrupt halt. So to keep the existential crisis at bay, I popped an edible. Then I went to another semi-tongue-in-cheek session on AI. After that I decided to head to the LAN party room (which on a side note was a very muted experience this year compared to previous years… not sure why) and decided to get back to work.
Of course in true Linux fashion, upon hooking up my travel keyboard, a LoFree Flow 100, I encountered Linux related issues around the fact that my function keys would ONLY act as fashionable media key shortcuts and not as actual function keys. So instead of writing any code, I instead got diverted into that rabbit hole. Did I fix that problem? Not really, no. But I did develop a workaround of sorts and it sucks (aka shell script you run every time you plug it in). In any event, I have yet to return to that code. Later on after having dinner with my good friend Kelly, who came with me to the conference this year, I more or less passed out during the first quarter of the Knicks game in my room and thankfully woke up midway through the fourth quarter in time to watch them win the championship. So that part was nice.
Anyway back to the coding project: I guess I could just ask Claude to do it. Or fire up a local LLM on my Framework Desktop and ask it to do it. But that wouldn’t be any fun. If I was just going to do it that way, I could just fire up a Search Engine and get the answer. But as is quickly becoming clear to me, the destination is more important to the majority of people than the journey itself. In my personal view, sometimes, actually most of the time, the journey is the meat of life. The destination is just the transition into whatever the next journey happens to be. But to be fair it took me a long time to appreciate this and even now it can be hard to remember this adage when it comes to facing the daily trials associated with work and with life.
Yet the destination is the thing we all celebrate and crow on about. But it’s not actually the stuff of life. The journey is. My primary takeaway, is that AI and LLMs are taking the joy of the journey away from software engineers and a lot of us seem quite content to embrace that new reality with open arms. I obviously do not count myself among those who feel that way.
Anyway now that I’m sitting here editing this post and getting ready to film the YouTube version of it a few days later, I gotta say: My feelings on this years Southeast Linuxfest were pretty mixed. I think this largely boils down to the idea that the embrace of AI / LLM technologies by FOSS advocates is a rather offensive idea to me. Namely because you can’t guarantee that the software produced by an LLM is free and unencumbered by other intellectual property concerns because you have no idea what lineage or inspirations are attached to said code. Secondarily it’s because the entire underlying point of the FOSS movement is to allow the users to remain in the drivers seat when it comes to dictating what their software does, how it works and how they use it. But how can you accomplish that when you form an innate dependency on an opaque AI model that is hosted in a variety of data centers and is made available only to those who can afford to pay the per-token rate?
To me this trend spits directly in the face of what the free and open source movement is actually about. Anybody advocating for it has clearly not fully thought it through and has instead decided to embrace the vibes over the much more difficult path of maintaining a rational disposition in the face of overwhelming professional pressure to adopt such tools.
At the end of the day, the question I can’t answer or forget is of course: What can I do about any of this?
The answer of course is: I have no fucking idea. Lemme know if you figure out dear reader.