this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (9 children)

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.

[–] ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com 38 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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

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.

[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Tools are just tools

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.

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