ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Torvalds loves AI to show new developers the joy of programming.
- Torvalds discusses changes in the Linux kernel development process.
- AI has become an essential part of finding and fixing bugs in the Linux kernel.
PRAGUE – Many open-source developers still don’t like AI. The latest example is System76 banning AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop. At the Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds offered a different take: “I really like using AI,” Torvald told Dirk Hohndel, his close friend and head of Ericsson Software Technology, in their final discussion.
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But this enthusiasm comes with a difference to keep in mind. Using AI to make a hobby project more enjoyable is one thing. Using it responsibly in the Linux kernel, where generated patches and bug reports can overwhelm maintainers, is another.
Torvalds said: “I think you have to be very careful with using AI if you’re doing something real and important.”
Torvalds likes AI, especially for beginners
“To be fair,” he continued, “I don’t do a lot of kernel programming. I’m a maintainer. The Linux kernel is a project where other people do the real work, and I act as a rallying point. But I still really enjoy programming. I think AI is a wonderful tool if you use it properly and treat it as a tool, and I think it makes programming much more enjoyable.
Torvalds recalled: “I started programming in 1981 or so, and back then computers were much simpler, and you could understand what they were doing, and also the programs you compare your own programs to were much simpler.”
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“It’s a different story today,” Torvalds said. “The bar in software engineering has grown so high that it’s hard to see your own small efforts as worthwhile because you’re used to all these polished, professional programs.”
“A lot of people make fun of vibe coding, but I think it’s a wonderful way to find joy in programming. It makes you feel like you’re doing something relevant. It allows you as a new programmer to do things that you would otherwise have a really hard time with.”
He continued: “I liked the concept of AI as a gateway drug because I was working on my own game project, the guitar pedal, and I knew what I was doing. I had a user interface that I wrote myself in C that ran on a microcontroller that ran on this little screen, and I was like, “This is just stupid. It looks like something from the 80s; I wanted it to look like something from this century. But I don’t do Java. I make grains.”
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“So, I use AI to do the things I’m bad at,” Torvalds continued, “I’ve seen all the same YouTube videos you have. Give AI a prompt, and it’ll do it. So I gave it a prompt, and it did it, and it was terrible. Then I said, ‘Hey, look! I’ve already done this in C.
AI in the Linux kernel
That’s not to say that AI isn’t useful for finding and fixing bugs in the Linux kernel. Hohndel asked about Sashiko, an agent-based Linux kernel code review system. Torvalds said his public reviews now appear on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). In fact, some subsystem maintainers now expect patches to have received such a review before accepting them.
That doesn’t mean all pull requests have to go through an AI review. Some maintainers require it, however, and it seems likely that all will require it eventually.
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AI tools can identify real security problems. They can also cause problems in old, unused drivers that have been unnoticed for years. Torvalds sees value in the resulting fixes, while acknowledging their costs. “It is, I think, to improve our code base… Even though it also stresses maintainers that there is a problem.”
As Torvalds said earlier this year in Mumbai. convincing but fabricated bug reports may require significant human effort to replicate, while narrowly targeted patches may fix one symptom without addressing the underlying problem. Torvalds called some submissions “mindless Band-Aid kind of patches”.
That said, AI code checking is here, and it’s here to stay. For example, Torvalds said, “Three-quarters of the previous day’s Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit discussion involved AI generation and making review less stressful and more useful. The bottleneck doesn’t get patches. There’s useful work to be done through review without exhausting the people responsible for it.”
‘Me, me, and my computer’
Since it was Linux’s 35th anniversary, Torvalds also talked about how the process of making Linux has changed over the years. In the beginning, Linux had no development infrastructure to speak of. Instead, Torvalds tracked changes through tarball patches and regularly distributed updated source code.
“I made internal patches every day, and I released them at least weekly,” he recalled. “And it actually worked surprisingly well for a small project.”
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Hohndel notes that the distribution of new tarballs and their accompanying changes continued until 2002, when Linux became a much larger enterprise. Back in those days, Torvalds said, “It was really just me, me and my computer.”
His reluctance to adopt existing source control tools was not simply tenacity. He wanted developers to work independently, with their own local environment. “I really felt very strongly that everyone should have their own local setup,” he said.
As I explained in my 2025 account of Linux’s growth, drawing on Jonathan Corbet’s history of the project, Linux’s openness attracted an expanding development community. But relying on Torvalds to manually apply incoming patches became a bottleneck. Accepting contributions by hand was no longer enough. the project needed a better way to integrate them.
BitKeeper was controversial – and useful
The BitKeeper version control system provided this improvement, although its proprietary license divided the kernel community. Some developers refuse to use it. Torvalds, however, found that distributed source control made it significantly easier to merge the work of subsystems such as networking in ARM. Torvalds said: “BitKeeper, as far as I’m concerned, has been a huge success.”
He did not consider it flawless. Rather, it showed him what source control could do and helped him identify what he actually wanted. Also, its adoption required all maintainers to use the same tool.
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Then the 2005 BitKeeper licensing dispute took away the tool he depended on. After experiencing distributed source control, going back to the old approach was no longer attractive. Git was Torvalds’ answer.
Hohndel recalled that it took Torvalds 11 days to produce the first working version: a new object model, code and a working tool in under two weeks. Early Git was not universally popular. Developers used to CVS found it unfamiliar, and its first versions had rough edges.
His eventual success still surprises Torvalds. Today, according to a 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey, Git has become the de facto standard for version control: Almost 94% of respondents, and almost 97% of professional developers, use Git. All Torvalds wanted was a tool for Linux, not to reinvent software development everywhere. As he put it, “I sometimes get way too much credit for Git.”
After about six months, he handed over his maintenance. His point was that the later decades of development belonged to other people, not that the first work was unimportant. “It’s worth noting that Git today is much better than Git was in 2005.”
The guy should improve without becoming exciting
The Linux release process has undergone another major change, from long-lived, separate stable and development trees toward frequent releases, a merge window, and release candidates.
Under the older model, work accumulated in the development tree while distributions ported back the desired changes to stable kernels. Releases intended to happen every year could stretch into years, making planning difficult. Torvalds proposes a dramatically shorter cycle. The reaction was not enthusiastic. “People looked at me as if I had grown a third head.”
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His initial five-week goal was deliberately aggressive. The process eventually settled into the familiar nine to ten week rhythm. The result is a development model Torvalds still finds remarkably effective. “We have now, for the last 20 years, a really stable, working model.”
He also rejected the idea that Linux should be organized around dramatic feature launches. “I’m a big believer in very incremental small changes that turn into big features over time.” As he said in Mumbai this summer, Linux’s development goal remains “incremental improvement and constant progress all the time.”
So, while AI is changing Linux’s problem-finding and fixing mechanisms, the name of the game for Linux remains quick, small improvements to an essential, stable operating system.