"hi I'm Linus. I'm 23, and I like computers."
Wtf is with using old pictures of tech guys.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Glorious leader does not age. His youth and virility are timeless.
It's a perfectly reasonable position: fork the kernel with a purist no-ai approach and see where it's going. It's literally what open-source is about. No need for a screaming contest, just do the thing you are convinced of and compete for the best solution.
+1
Proof is in the puddin’.
If people think these specific guidelines will poison the kernel, well, let’s see if they do.
If it happens, go back to or fork it from an earlier point.
It honestly isn’t any different than previous kernel controversies.
Arent the issues with ai in the linux kernel ethical, not about code quality?
It’s not linux’s job to be an ethical gatekeeper, within reason.
Let me ask you this; if you’re from a certain country, from a certain background or whatever, should you not be allowed to contribute the kernel? Or submit a bug report?
Devs of open source projects often find out others doing things they don’t like with their code. Or find major contributors have backgrounds they don’t like.
Happens all the time; drama ensues. But at the end of the day a permissively licensed project is out there, the work on it is done by whoever’s already contributed. And the Linux project, in particular, is not in the business of trying to personally judge every entity behind the code contributions.
I’d assert LLM agent usage is the same. Maintainers/reviewers don’t have to like LLMs, but it’s not really Linux’s job to judge who (or what) wrote the contribution; just if the code is good, or not.
I’d argue a different policy is a bad precedent. It opens the door to judging people, too.
And it’s also impractical. Contributors are going to use agents, so mind as well encourage them to attribute them rather than encouraging them to be unethical, and hiding it.
Now, should LLMs be maintainers? Hell no.
Should they blindly contribute code? Hell. No. Hence the policy requires a human to be responsible for it: https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html
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Realistically, this is as much about not wanting to police constant AI drama as it is about AI coding utility. Like it or not that cat is out of the bag, but as long as you enforce the same development guidelines in terms of code quality, PR rules and such, the impact should be small. Arguably the bigger issue would come with taking a hardline approach where you inevitably spend a bunch of time arguing over AI accusations. We are already quickly approaching a point where it feels half the Internet is AI, and the other half is arguing about whether something is or isn't AI. That's just not going to work for FOSS development.
I'm arguing that it's not a small difference since the cognitive burden is put on maintainers who are already overworked. Now they need to edit through AI PR manure to find decent requests. A lot of OSS projects have stopped taking public PRs for this reason. It shifts the cognitive burden from the programmer to make good code, onto the reviewer to read and understand AI slop contribution.
It's not worth it to review community PRs anymore
AI slop is DDOSing open source
Agentic code is worse to maintain and breaks more often, especially when refactoring.
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Theres a forming deeply uninformed / misinformed loud group of people who desperately want to hate on AI being used for anything, even in scenarios where its actually perfectly good at its job.
Even when extremely seasoned professionals with waaaay more experience are stating "its a perfectly fine tool" these folks somehow cannot wrap their head around the possibility someone like fucking Linus Torvalds might know better than them.
Imagine having the utter balls to assert you know better than Torvalds about whether a technology is good or not 😐
Meanwhile those of us actually in the field have known for over a year now that the tools are pretty good now and very useful.
"the only conceivable reason anyone could object is that they're ignorant" is cultish logic. Adding "my hero likes it so it can't be bad" does not help.
Some of us have been "in the field" for decades and don't like these tools for many reasons, including "the output is unacceptable bad" and "the tools are built in unethical and morally deficient ways".
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The fact that some people don’t want to see AI being used to generate code does not make them dumb or misinformed. They may be informed, and simply reached a different conclusion than you.
Also, you have to consider that some of the most popular tools are controlled by a select few and that concentration can be used to control markets and users, reinforce biases, and shape what gets encouraged.
Finally, the use of AI can easily feed into a maximalist view of "produce more and faster" that has direct consequences like layoffs, increased cost of hardware, increased resource usage, increased environmental impact.
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I hate AI as in, I hate Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, etc. for pushing it everywhere, being an oligopoly, and using it for mass surveillance. But AI as a tool is fantastic for some tasks
All major operating systems and software has been around before AI. Sure, AI might have some uses, even good ones but not enough to warrant all the negative effects it and all those datacenters running the models have.
Some people just don’t care about the negative effects and Torvalds is obviously one of them.
To be fair, many have had their workplace enshittified by AI, or managers with AI psychosis.
Or fired over it.
…I think it’s understandable for people to be pissed, and take an absolutionist position, as the leads who see it as a tool seem to be few and far between.
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Every single generative tool is built on theft. No one has a training database that only contains code they were given legal permission to use for that purpose. Moreover, if these tools were trained on any GNU GPL code, then the tool and all of its output should also be GNU GPL:
if you distribute a derivative work or modification, you must provide the source code to those recipients under the same or equivalent license terms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
None of the companies developing these tools are obeying the terms of the licenses. The trained models are the product of theft.
You cannot be a moral person and approve of the use of these tools, they are diametrically opposed.
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Social media is a much bigger and dangerous threat to mankind than AI will ever be.
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“Year of the BSD desktop.” ?
I have found no indication that FreeBSD won't accept LLM-assisted contributions... On their wiki there is a small section about rules for a summer of code event, where they forbid it being used for coding, but just because that event is intended to be about learning... That doesn't sound like a clear "no" to all LLM contributions.
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Programmers are hilariously dumb for how smart they are, the whole concept of AI "being the future" is a perfect example of it.
What about the third option? Stay, but don't pay to use an "AI" service.
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