I honestly trust him. He knows what he's doing. He isn't a kid who just got their hands on a new tool
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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We as society in general keep seeing over and never to trust those in charge to any degree without proper verification.
No one is immune to LLMs bullshit. The studies are not good, none of them that are reputable anyway.
Even if Linus is himself capable, his use and endorsement of AI is going to have the massive knock on effect of people learning less and less to code properly.
Progress for progress sake is not what Linux is even about.
So we're "move fast and break things" now by the looks of it and I don't like it.
I hope you're right. LLMs are doing weird things with our brains.
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Almost anyone can cut and paste a face on a different body using a classic photo editor.
It still takes a profesional to do it in a way that delivers a quality result.
Linus Torvalds is a professional, the linux terminal is his baby, if we can trust anyone on this, its him.
The amateurs using ai to produce slop that resembles what we perceive as quality, is sometimes hard to tell but 25 years ago people though half life 1 looked insanely realistic and that graphics could not possibly look any more real. Over time our brains will adapt and we will be able to tell slop from real work in a heartbeat. I bet most people here can already tell if a mail was written by an llm and not audited by a human with ease.
I'm worried about cognitive surrender. There's evidence of people losing skills they once had because they stopped doing it themselves and just get AI to do it for them.
"Using AI for Just 10 Minutes Erodes Your Ability to Persist at Hard Things": https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/using-ai-just-10-minutes-erodes-your-ability-persist-hard-things
They should run the test with calculators, because they'll see the same effect. Turns out that giving people a tool to make things trivial, and then taking that tool away, halfway through the goddamn exam, is a lot more frustrating than just asking them to do some algebra on paper.
'Bicycling for just ten miles makes walking back seem like a pain in the ass.'
going to just copy and paste my reply to your other comment: AI is not a tool it is a replacement, there’s no skill in using AI
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If he's still auditing and understanding the code. Something that he's done as a project manager for decades at this point. I don't see how it will. If the code is generated by a person or a machine. The auditing isn't much different.
Ironically, I find the LLMs to be better at auditing code than generating it in the first place. Like the humans they trained under, LLMs make mistakes and miss important things in both endeavors, but: when an LLM finds a real problem, that's a win no matter how you look at it.
Definitely. I just hope that sooner rather than later it's possible for them all to move over to local open source models. Supporting wasteful content thieves is not sustainable.
That and that all the GPU manufacturers Etc have their sound blaster moment. These days a lot of socs have quite powerful Graphics accelerators on them. At some point, someone's going to release a bit of silicon equivalent to the AC 97. May not have been able to compete with sound blaster on the ridiculously high end of the market. But was good enough for 99% of tasks. So that most people don't even remember sound blaster anymore. Even though they still technically exist.
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yeah I agree with this statement. it’s not that LLM are necessarily bad it’s making people reliant and lazy which leads to complacency.
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We didn't think Half Life 1 looked realistic against reality, just that it was the most realistic graphics we had seen yet.
It's not like we looked at the game and went that's indistinguishable from reality.
but isn't using AI inherently unethical?
Yes, and the people doing mental gymnastics to defend it are unprincipled losers and/or cucks to the billionaires.
The models used to generate code were built by stealing from us. Fuck whatever stupid opinions you might have on copyright; you were exploited. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, etc are making money, corrupting our democracy, and destroying our way of life because they stole our work. They wouldn't be able to do that without the massive theft of labor they've committed, or if our government actually enforced the laws that they broke, and are currently still breaking.
Why should these scumbags (or anyone) be able to steal and profit from our labor? Are we going to accept our assigned roles as mere cattle for the megacriminals? Will you be happy when your daughter is conscripted as a "breeder" for Elon Musk? Or when your son dies fighting in a war for resources so we can build more data centers?
Or how about when the subsidized tokens run out, you can't afford to use the models you've become unable to function without, and are forced to go work in an Amazon warehouse or copper mine or some shit because you eagerly and enthusiastically contributed to the monopolization of your own labor, and were too stupid to realize it before it was too late?
I don't like using the word "theft" because it implies this is primarily a property rights issue, and IMO it's much more of a labor rights and moral rights issue. This ain't gonna be solved by just enforcing existing copyright laws when employers, publishers, social media companies, etc. can effectively force creators to waive their rights as copyright holders. (Sign away your rights to AI training or you won't get a record deal! Sign away your rights to AI training or you won't get any work at all!) I tend to think we should focus on bringing back sectoral bargaining (like what the Hollywood writers and actors did) and/or creating new laws that recognize inalienable moral rights for creators.
But otherwise, yes. I very much agree.
My subjective opinion is that yeah it is unethical, but not more then so many other things we normalised.
Systematicly slaughtering animals for meat for example.
I am not a vegitarian by any means. You cannot fight on all fronts at once and have to pick your own battles in context of your own lifes challenges.
Cars poison the air and kill many people, i dont drive a car for that reason because thats a fight i can fight. I have sensativities with food, so i am not cutting out meat. (I aim to do so some day)
I moved to linux some years ago by getting help from an llm which requires datacenters build by malicious companies. I don't have a google or meta account and my cloud and media is hosted locally on recycled hardware. Where for others those services require datacenters build by malicious companies.
Life is various shades of grey.
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I can vouch for that: As a programmer, I can generally see both programming AI and general LLM use if it was copy-pasted. I know a guy who isn't a programmer who've used Claude Code to make an app, and things are working, but it's sooo clear even to a junior SE that it's vibe-coded. There's a clear lack of consistency, architecture, maintainability, and general human readability.
However, if the code/text was reviewed and edited by a capable human programmer, it's incredibly difficult to single out what is a product of AI and not.
Actual programmers who understand and can write code themselves who use AI simply as a tool, NOT a shortcut, will produce indistinguishable code. Linus is an incredibly smart and capable guy, and for specific uses, I'm confident in him using this tool responsibly.
(The ethics of AI use is a different topic however...)
How do you see the longevity of it. You obviously learnt how to code before ai. What about those learning now that are learning only having access to ai. Id anticipate the quality over time will deteriorate
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Linus explained in that Git tag message that he "did what I preach" and used modern LLM tools to make sense of patches that were hard for him to follow.
It’s already too late. He’s gone down the rabbit hole.
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Meh, its less exciting whenever Claude Code is involved; I am wondering how many undetected bugs will sneak into the kernel. If he was going to use an LLM, he could at least use something local and not connected to one of the many nasty big corps that are ruining shit.
You wouldn't want him using a local model unless he was running some fancy rig that could run a high end frontier model. He might not have such a thing laying around. Using the best out there for something like this is how you help avoid bugs.
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I'd love to see a pre-AI fork of the Linux kernel.
You can do it always
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