I think you may be misunderstanding the situation. He’s telling AI critics to stop complaining or fork. If that happens, the main branch will still have AI submissions, and the fork will be the AI-free one.
Important to note: Torvalds is not an LLM evangelist, nor does he just accept AI slop uncritically. The official policy is that LLM written/assisted code is fine, but the quality must hit the bar expected of Linux kernel submissions, and the submitter takes full responsibility for the code correctness whether they personally wrote it or not. Just submitting LLM code with no verification or tests is a great way of getting banned from submitting pull requests and getting a very angry email from Linus.
And also he’s not advocating for everyone to start using it, rather saying that as the primary kernel maintainer, he’s finding it useful to help do a first pass triage on the flood of PRs.
He did not say that. He said that he only uses git and email as primary tools to work on Linux.
He said he does use LLMs for personal projects to test out ideas.
What he said in this case is that people who contribute to Linux can use AI if they wish as long as their code is good and that nobody should attack them for using AI.
If they fork, they leave the main branch AI free, doing their own thing. This way the main branch does not go down the toilet with AI. This is good.
I think you may be misunderstanding the situation. He’s telling AI critics to stop complaining or fork. If that happens, the main branch will still have AI submissions, and the fork will be the AI-free one.
Important to note: Torvalds is not an LLM evangelist, nor does he just accept AI slop uncritically. The official policy is that LLM written/assisted code is fine, but the quality must hit the bar expected of Linux kernel submissions, and the submitter takes full responsibility for the code correctness whether they personally wrote it or not. Just submitting LLM code with no verification or tests is a great way of getting banned from submitting pull requests and getting a very angry email from Linus.
And also he’s not advocating for everyone to start using it, rather saying that as the primary kernel maintainer, he’s finding it useful to help do a first pass triage on the flood of PRs.
He did not say that. He said that he only uses git and email as primary tools to work on Linux.
He said he does use LLMs for personal projects to test out ideas.
What he said in this case is that people who contribute to Linux can use AI if they wish as long as their code is good and that nobody should attack them for using AI.