Linus Torvalds on LLM usage in kernel development (via)
The intersection of AI tooling and open source projects is interesting to me. I’ve also come around to the reality that LLM-powered coding agents like Claude code or codex are pretty clearly game changing when it comes to how software gets produced.
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.
I also agree this wasn’t true even a year ago, but the last couple of generations of models have seen some sort of threshold crossed that we didn’t know was there and they are legitimately very useful in my day to day work now.
They also fundamentally change the nature of open source software development. Now that writing code by hand is virtually an obsolete skill, where does that leave maintainers? And what is the point of open source?
Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a side benefit, not the point of the project.
This was part of it, and a big part of what I love about it. To me it’s really enjoyable working on interesting projects with a globally distributed team of people who also enjoy the work. Part of it was also performative, a way to demonstrate publicly that you could write decent software. I think that is mostly over.
In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.
Maybe that just leaves us with this — writing open source because it produces better results. This doesn’t strike me as universally true though. I guess it depends what you mean by “better”, but I can think of many examples of software where the proprietary version is much better than the OSS one.