So Linus Torvalds has been caught using AI to help write kernel code, and the internet did what the internet does. “Linux Torvalds Turns to Slop”, wrote one headline. A podcaster announced that the kernel “goes full AI slop code”. A commenter even decided the whole thing was a publicity stunt ordered by his “AI overlords” at the Linux Foundation. Thirty-five years of running the most important open source project on the planet, and apparently one autocomplete session undoes it all.
I read the actual Linus Torvalds AI position this week, and it’s a lot less dramatic than the outrage suggests. It’s also, annoyingly, pretty sensible.
What Linus Torvalds actually said about AI
His line, sent to columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, is this: “I really think we want competent people to use AI as a tool.” He calls the argument against using AI for commit messages “entirely misguided”. Note the word competent. That’s the whole point, and it’s the part the pitchfork crowd skipped.
Because Linus has a very different problem in mind, and it’s not AI. It’s what he calls “drive-by patches”: people who generate a diff they don’t understand, fire it at a mailing list, and walk away feeling like a kernel contributor. The AI didn’t create that person. It just gave them a faster way to waste a maintainer’s afternoon.
He’s not slamming the door on beginners either. “We all start clueless, but some people spend the time and effort to become something more.” That’s about as warm as Linus gets in public, so savour it.
The kernel’s two AI problems
The more interesting bit is his diagnosis. According to him, the kernel has “two independent AI problems”. The first is good news dressed as bad news: the codebase is enormous, and AI tools are now finding real bugs in it. Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed the shift back in March. A year ago the security reports coming in were “AI slop”, obviously wrong. Then, almost overnight, they became “good, and they’re real”. Great for Linux users. Less great for maintainers who were already drowning, and now have a robot pointing at fires they didn’t know about.
The second problem is the human one: people shipping patches they can’t explain. And here’s the quote I’d pin on every project’s contribution guide: the “underlying issue isn’t AI itself”. AI just exposes what was already broken, namely a review pipeline built for a world where writing code was the hard part.
That framing matters because of a decision taken at the Kernel Maintainers Summit in Prague a couple of weeks ago. Sasha Levin announced the “Assisted-by” tag is being deprecated. Translation: you no longer have to declare whether an AI touched your patch. Some people read that as surrender. I read it as realism. The tag was unenforceable, half the people using AI wouldn’t tag it anyway, and the thing that actually protects the kernel is the same thing it’s always been: brutal code review. Slop still doesn’t merge. It just doesn’t get a special sticker before being rejected.
Why the Luddite comparison half works
Vaughan-Nichols compares the critics to Luddites and predicts that by 2030, hand-written code will be as common as hand weaving. I think that’s a bit much (the Luddites also had a point about who captures the gains, and that argument isn’t settled). The concerns about model collapse, about models trained on GPL code without a second thought for the licence, about who gets paid, those are real. Even Linus isn’t pretending otherwise.
But none of that is an argument for refusing the tool. If you’ve ever watched an AI agent go off the rails, you know the risk isn’t the model writing code. It’s nobody checking what it wrote. The kernel has thousands of people doing exactly that, which is why I’m less worried about Linux than about the startup whose entire backend was vibe-coded last Tuesday.
My practical takeaway, if you contribute to anything open source: use whatever tool you like, but be able to defend every line in your patch as if you’d typed it with your own fingers. If you can’t, you’re not contributing. You’re forwarding.
Linus hasn’t lowered his standards. He’s just stopped caring which keyboard you used to miss them.
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