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.
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.