Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
lore.kernel.org
Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#2You always hear about when Linus has an outburst, but this was a cogent, relaxed and nice response to a big question.
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#3As per usual, a very good and sane take indeed.
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#4You always hear about when Linus has an outburst, but this was a cogent, relaxed and nice response to a big question.
Thing is even in some outbursts he was right.
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#5A disappointing take because it contains some broad statements lacking nuance this requires. Comes across like he's just tired of talking about it or whatever. But that's not good enough. As with all things AI, it isn't about the tools or using them, it's about the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it in a mutitude of areas because of all the areas technology touches.
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#6As per usual, a very good and sane take indeed.
Sane take getting zero traction on HN, meanwhile every dumb EA/doomer post rockets to the top.
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#7Crazy that this hasn't got more traction here. Maybe people missed this thread.
Agentic cli based coding "got good" (around Oct/Nov 2025), and after just a short trial period, most devs in our company were convinced enough to start using it. The graph from "not using it much" to "95% of code written by AI" was incredibly steep. It was obvious from around that point, but particularly from around Opus 4.6 that this was actually, very, very good, provided you understand the failure cases and worked to eliminate them.
Ever since then the story has been about the % of developers denying it can write anything decent dwindling, and right now there are very few left who say this. Places like reddit and HN seem to attract a lot of them though, so weirdly, despite in the real world most professional software developers using these tools prolifically, it can seem as though it is 50/50 here.
When even someone like Linus Torvalds (the most crotchety of crotchetiers) is accepting it, you must know you're on the wrong side by denying it at this point. Surely the cognitive dissonance must be grating?
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#8A disappointing take because it contains some broad statements lacking nuance this requires. Comes across like he's just tired of talking about it or whatever. But that's not good enough. As with all things AI, it isn't about the tools or using them, it's about the scale. The scale of impact is immense and we're not ready to handle it in a mutitude of areas because of all the areas technology touches.
You're not wrong but there's no need to digress further than the project he manages. Also many seem to think it's wrong to like some parts about a public figure (which he clearly is) while not agreeing with everything he says. You don't have to like his stance on this!!
He's not writing code, he merges 200 PR in 2 weeks. From this POV an AI eases his workload, but he makes no difference whether he dislikes AI generated code or is just fine with found bugs by it.
Still he has no idea whether the person suggesting a feature or fix has any actual knowledge about the code so when problems come up there's no one there taking responsibility and i think that's shortsighted.
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#9Crazy that this hasn't got more traction here. Maybe people missed this thread. Agentic cli based coding "got good" (around Oct/Nov 2025), and after just a short trial period, most devs in our company were convinced enough to start using it. The graph from "not using it much" to "95% of code written by AI" was incredibly steep. It was obvious from around that point, but particularly from around Opus 4.6 that this was…
No one has to agree with this just because torvalds said it.
You can also read up here: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20260715125058.3692aa03@... that this thread is about code analysis not generating it and the signal/noise ratio. It's not like his opinion is shared by everyone because these people actually have to look at the PRs generated and filter out all the noise.
The issue is not AI finding bugs is bad, it's that usually a maintainer gets offloaded 1000s of automatically generated PRs where 99,9% are BS and is then expected to read and check and understand all of them, immediately merging the 0,1 actually pointing out a real security issue.
You working in some "we replaced MS Access with another high-level language tool"-place is so far off this level of engineering i'm not surprised you only took the information "AI good" from this then told everyone else about how wrong they are to not use it.
Re: Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development
#10The take is reasonable, but as we all know Linus has stopped coding since forever at this point in time. It's easy for him to make this statements in the position he is in