Linus Torvalds Puts His Foot Down, Tells Anti-AI Programmers To 'Fork It' - and Then This Happened
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Many people hate AI. They don't trust it a bit. Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, isn't one of them. Torvalds thinks AI can be quite useful for programming and maintenance. Indeed, AI is explicitly approved for use in the Linux kernel.
However, that didn't stop some people from wondering if AI should be used in Linux development. For example, the Zig language project has adopted strict policies against AI-generated code.
To those who'd like to see Linux take a similar stance, Torvalds recently replied on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), that if you can't support using AI in the Linux kernel, you "can do the open-source thing and fork it."
He's not joking. Torvalds also wrote, "I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer."
Why? Because "AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that 'clearly' even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today."
As Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux stable kernel, told me earlier this year, "Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality." But then, he continued, "the world switched. Now we have real reports. All open-source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real."
Other open-source developers and maintainers agree. Starting with the 2026 frontier models, such as Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8, AI programming is vastly improved. As Torvalds continued, "There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but 'is it useful?' is no longer one of those questions."
That said, Torvalds knows full well that AI is far from perfect. "Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool ... But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do."
No, concluded Torvalds, "The solution is to make sure those LLM toolshelp maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side." Therefore, while Torvalds won't force anyone to use AI, "I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it."
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