July 18, 2026
One last bikeshed, one huge meltdown
Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
The old-guard exit turned into a privacy panic and a full-on comment war
TLDR: ACM Queue published a farewell column from a veteran writer reflecting on artificial intelligence tools, open software, and online age checks. But readers fixated on the privacy angle, accusing the piece of excusing surveillance while others mocked the usual old-man-on-the-internet energy.
A farewell essay on ACM Queue was supposed to be a thoughtful mic drop from longtime columnist Poul-Henning Kamp. Instead, the real fireworks exploded in the comments, where readers treated his goodbye like the opening bell of a full-scale internet cage match. Kamp looked back on nearly 20 years of his famously opinionated “Bikeshed” column, took a swipe at the artificial intelligence gold rush, and argued that age checks online are one of the next big fights for free and open software. That alone was enough to send people into the replies with torches, memes, and receipts.
The strongest reaction? Privacy panic. Several commenters were furious at any suggestion that age verification could be acceptable, reading it as a straight-up attack on anonymity online. One person bluntly asked if ACM had gone “anti-privacy,” while another accused the whole argument of dressing up surveillance in a “think of the children” costume. Others went even further, saying the biggest winners would be giant companies and data-hungry startups, not ordinary users. In other words: if this is about safety, why does it look so profitable for the people already holding the keys?
And because no comment thread is complete without a little comedy, one reader cracked that Kamp’s line about “old men who are certain they’re right” sounded suspiciously like Hacker News itself, complete with a joking “didn’t it exist 20 years ago?” self-own. So yes, the article said goodbye — but the crowd replied with sarcasm, side-eye, and a privacy riot.
Key Points
- •Poul-Henning Kamp presents the article as his final Bikeshed column in ACM Queue after nearly 20 years of intermittent publication.
- •He identifies LLM-assisted code reviews and age verification as two current major issues in free and open source software.
- •The excerpt argues that automated code-quality tools often produce an initial wave of findings followed by diminishing returns, based on Kamp’s experience with tools such as lint(1) and Clang static analysis.
- •Kamp says LLM tools appear capable of exploring bug patterns more broadly and deeply than humans, which he compares to computers playing chess.
- •He says the main open question about LLM code-review tools is whether they are economically viable outside the current AI investment bubble because training costs are high while the resulting model can be distributed cheaply.