Torvalds: "100% of Their Code Is Written by Compilers" Too. The Linux creator argued that AI-written code claims are misleading — and warned that a wave of low-quality, AI-generated bug reports is quietly burning out the maintainers who keep open source running.
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.
Why are you rejecting the low-effort, Ai generated bug reports, Linus, isn’t AI just a productivity tool?
Because they are low effort. Good software engineering is never low effort, whether you use AI or not.
If you let AI replace people, and let them mess with software or report issues without understanding what’s going on, without putting in the effort to understand what’s going on, you’re not adding any value; just noise.
But if you use AI to find issues, then investigate the issue, reproduce it, document it, etc, then you’ve got something meaningful that someone can do something with.
But if you use AI to find issues, then investigate the issue, reproduce it, document it, etc, then you’ve got something meaningful that someone can do something with.
In principle that is sound, but LLMs can’t do that, yet, if ever. Sounds like anthropomorphism. The ‘hallucination’ thing is intrinsic. What you can do is point it at easily verifiable problems like searching for security flaws, and then verify them. Whether that’s cost effective in wasted energy and human time is still an open question, especially as token cost ramps up pre IPO.
They can find issues now though. Will they also find non issues due to missing context or not understanding the whole operational picture, well yes, but you can usually filter those ones out quickly. While i wish we had QA back and it be a norm again in software engineering as a whole, without it I’m happy to have something look for ways my code will break in unexpected manners that testers previously handled. Is it the same as having someone sit their and try and break your shit for the sole purpose of finding a spot where something will go completely off the rails, no its not but with a lack of true QA and rushed timelines that leave little room for quality QA yourself. I dont mind having something else that will try to gage my code from all angels and suggest areas that might have bugs I did not intend for or did not catch when I was reviewing my code. Especially considering I can do this without making users of my code the guinea pigs in lieu of an actual QA department. Sometimes you have to make the best of a shitty situation and honestly its an improvement over no QA which has been a norm for a while now so I’ll take the small wins where I can
Lazy people using tools in a shitty manner has been an age old problem.
This just lets it scale, which is the problem. There used to be a barrier to entry for those less knowledgeable or experienced, now there isn’t and that’s the result.
It is a productivity tool, and it’s being used as one, by both people that know how and people who don’t.
bingo. and unfortunately the lazy and inexperienced are using it more than others, or using it at a much higher degree. Linus even says it himself. they file a report and then “vanish” because they can’t answer follow up questions or clarifications because they don’t know how. if you deal with LLMs and the people that use them as much as I do for my job you see this constantly. daily even. they “build” something and when it’s reviewed and questioned the answers are just no where to be found because the “coder” can’t answer them.
Like the other day there’s this guy on Youtube who is a huge advocate for Omarchy for whatever reason. older guy but he’s always going on about how great Omarchy is. he posts a video about how “we” built some application for Omarchy but the entire video is him putting prompts into Claude Code and then walking away. never touches it, never writes a line of code. but there were glaring bugs with the build so I reached out to him, asked him how he was going to address these things and hoping he wouldn’t put this app out there because it’s clearly broken. works on a surface level but it WILL break. he essentially told me to “fuck off”.
you’re right an LLM is a tool but one that should be in the hands of those that know what they’re doing. you wouldn’t hand a hammer to a child and tell them to build a house. you wouldn’t hand a gun to a junkie and tell them they’re now a cop. I wouldn’t hand Vim to my mother and tell her to build a website. I feel LLMs should require human training just like any other tools we use. If you want to allow LLMs into your open source project, sure, have at it but it should be YOUR responsibility to vet and interview each individual that wishes to contribute utilizing said tools.
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
I don’t think that’s true, but we simply disagree on that.
I don’t think he’s hypocritical. He simply doesn’t have to deal with that negative impact he “warns” about. He is in support of using it as a tool and thinks the criticism is invalid. That’s a consistent perspective, even if I don’t agree with it.
If he used LLMs to create bug reports, but also complained about LLM written bug reports he gets, that would be hypocritical.
AI is useful as tool like he said, unfortunately these days in many organisations it is used as a replacement rather than a tool.
His conclusion was that as AI tools get more capable, the people who actually understand how systems work become more valuable, not less — because someone still has to review, maintain, and take responsibility for what the tools produce.
Ok…
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.
Because they are low effort. Good software engineering is never low effort, whether you use AI or not.
If you let AI replace people, and let them mess with software or report issues without understanding what’s going on, without putting in the effort to understand what’s going on, you’re not adding any value; just noise.
But if you use AI to find issues, then investigate the issue, reproduce it, document it, etc, then you’ve got something meaningful that someone can do something with.
In principle that is sound, but LLMs can’t do that, yet, if ever. Sounds like anthropomorphism. The ‘hallucination’ thing is intrinsic. What you can do is point it at easily verifiable problems like searching for security flaws, and then verify them. Whether that’s cost effective in wasted energy and human time is still an open question, especially as token cost ramps up pre IPO.
They can find issues now though. Will they also find non issues due to missing context or not understanding the whole operational picture, well yes, but you can usually filter those ones out quickly. While i wish we had QA back and it be a norm again in software engineering as a whole, without it I’m happy to have something look for ways my code will break in unexpected manners that testers previously handled. Is it the same as having someone sit their and try and break your shit for the sole purpose of finding a spot where something will go completely off the rails, no its not but with a lack of true QA and rushed timelines that leave little room for quality QA yourself. I dont mind having something else that will try to gage my code from all angels and suggest areas that might have bugs I did not intend for or did not catch when I was reviewing my code. Especially considering I can do this without making users of my code the guinea pigs in lieu of an actual QA department. Sometimes you have to make the best of a shitty situation and honestly its an improvement over no QA which has been a norm for a while now so I’ll take the small wins where I can
… What?
Lazy people using tools in a shitty manner has been an age old problem.
This just lets it scale, which is the problem. There used to be a barrier to entry for those less knowledgeable or experienced, now there isn’t and that’s the result.
It is a productivity tool, and it’s being used as one, by both people that know how and people who don’t.
bingo. and unfortunately the lazy and inexperienced are using it more than others, or using it at a much higher degree. Linus even says it himself. they file a report and then “vanish” because they can’t answer follow up questions or clarifications because they don’t know how. if you deal with LLMs and the people that use them as much as I do for my job you see this constantly. daily even. they “build” something and when it’s reviewed and questioned the answers are just no where to be found because the “coder” can’t answer them.
Like the other day there’s this guy on Youtube who is a huge advocate for Omarchy for whatever reason. older guy but he’s always going on about how great Omarchy is. he posts a video about how “we” built some application for Omarchy but the entire video is him putting prompts into Claude Code and then walking away. never touches it, never writes a line of code. but there were glaring bugs with the build so I reached out to him, asked him how he was going to address these things and hoping he wouldn’t put this app out there because it’s clearly broken. works on a surface level but it WILL break. he essentially told me to “fuck off”.
you’re right an LLM is a tool but one that should be in the hands of those that know what they’re doing. you wouldn’t hand a hammer to a child and tell them to build a house. you wouldn’t hand a gun to a junkie and tell them they’re now a cop. I wouldn’t hand Vim to my mother and tell her to build a website. I feel LLMs should require human training just like any other tools we use. If you want to allow LLMs into your open source project, sure, have at it but it should be YOUR responsibility to vet and interview each individual that wishes to contribute utilizing said tools.
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
I don’t think that’s true, but we simply disagree on that.
I don’t think he’s hypocritical. He simply doesn’t have to deal with that negative impact he “warns” about. He is in support of using it as a tool and thinks the criticism is invalid. That’s a consistent perspective, even if I don’t agree with it.
If he used LLMs to create bug reports, but also complained about LLM written bug reports he gets, that would be hypocritical.
AI is useful as tool like he said, unfortunately these days in many organisations it is used as a replacement rather than a tool.
His conclusion was that as AI tools get more capable, the people who actually understand how systems work become more valuable, not less — because someone still has to review, maintain, and take responsibility for what the tools produce.
Humans still need to learn how to code.