I hope this new adoption didn’t contributed to recent AMD GPU driver bugs
Pretty unlikely.
The way the kernel devs seem to be using LLMs isn’t really going to lead to any bugs that wound’t have snuck in anyways.
I’m not a tech bro or AI apologist. I’m choosing to skeptically trust Linus in this case. Based on my understanding of how it’s being used, I don’t think we have a lot to worry about.
That being said I wish he would STFU about it because the “Linus is pro-AI now guys” headlines are not doing the world any favors.
Torvalds was careful to frame this as a correction of language rather than a rejection of the technology itself.
Ok…
A maintainer burden few are talking about
Alongside the productivity gains, Torvalds described a less-discussed cost: a rising flood of low-effort, AI-generated bug and vulnerability reports hitting open source projects, including the kernel’s own security channels. He said it has become common for someone to run an AI tool against a codebase, file a report flagging a “possible” issue, and then vanish when a maintainer follows up asking for more detail or a fix.
Everyone is talking about that and it is surprising to me that he doesn’t recognize that as two side of the same coin. Why are you rejecting the low-effort, Ai generated bug reports, Linus, isn’t AI just a productivity tool? What’s wrong? Is it not being productive?
I say “surprising”, it’s not that surprising. It’s a “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” attitude. It’s willfully excluding the impact that technology has on people, and framing the outcome as coming purely from people and the existence of the technology not affecting the outcome.
Tools are just tools; there are good ways and bad ways to use them. “Grok, go find bugs in the Linux kernel” isn’t a good one. This isn’t hard to understand…
There were many, partially well-intentioned, mostly fame-seeking, one-off ‘projects’ ‘scanning’ public repos and flooding them with low-quality low-effort PRs and issues; things that no human ever read until the a maintainer did.
“They made a poison and sold us a cure” is absolutely a valid criticism; that’s two sides of the same coin. But pretending that he’s being hypocritical or that LLMs aren’t useful is just being wrong for the sake of hating AI
Yup. He’s lost.
Whole tech world is cooked
It’s a shame
Man I wish he would just shut up.
[Monkey’s finger curls]
You can no longer download his code for the kernel or git.
Using AI with Rust compiler is a combination that’s worked well for me many times already. You can check out https://slingshotspeeders.com/ if you want to experience compiled Rust in the browser using Bevy 0.19 for an orbital mechanics simulation racing game for free with no account easily.
