{"id":17025,"date":"2026-08-14T17:26:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T00:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=17025"},"modified":"2026-08-15T13:15:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T20:15:56","slug":"linux-is-not-one-of-those-anti-ai-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=17025","title":{"rendered":"“Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There’s a lot of pretty heavy AI rhetoric these days. Some of the strongest anti-AI stances are coming from content creators\/artists and from game developers. The software developer community is more muted. It is also seeing that AI is completely disrupting their industry and likely to kill thousands of developer jobs forever, but they aren’t quite as vocally anti-AI. Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe its because most of us have been changing and adapting to big effort reducing technologies on a regular basis for years (or decades in my case). First there were optimizing compilers, then there were developer tools and studios, then there were technology frameworks. Instead of trying to fight against technology – most developers have learned to survive one must be constantly adapting. To be a developer is to be constantly learning and growing. It’s one of the core traits needed by developers. Sticking your head in the mud or ignoring advancement rarely turns out well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI is very much looking to be the biggest change of them all. The industry will not be the same again. But the choice is to either embrace it so you can be part of the conversation that shapes it – or likely fight a losing battle against it with nothing really to offer the world in return to the conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open source has been also in a love-hate relationship with AI as well. What started off as legitimate complaints that AI was generating slop code and bug reports has rapidly and completely changed in the last 8 months. Now, open-source’s arguably most important person has spoken: Linus Torvalds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His stance: the Linux kernel is not anti-AI. AI is a tool and they will use whatever tools make it better – or you’re free to fork it and walk away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He’s also said they’re no longer interested in supporting obsolete hardware and that he’s largely now a development lead and most of the developers have started embracing LLM’s to assist day-to-day coding<\/a>\/bug fixing and work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Straight from the horse’s mouth<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Tue, 14 Jul 2026 at 19:01, Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev> wrote:\n>\n> I think it makes the point of sashiko - helping maintainers - unachievable. If the point to not use\n> LLMs in general, let\u2019s discuss this, not how to make each use case more complex.\n>\n> It seems like [1]  expresses a very anti-LLM position in general\n\nYes.\n\nAnd no, that's not the position of the Linux kernel.\n\nI realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area\nwhere I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level\nmaintainer.\n\nLinux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues\nwith that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.\n\nOr just walk away.\n\nAI is a tool, just like other tools we use.  And it's clearly a useful one.\n\nIt may not have been that \"clearly\" even just a year ago, but it's no\nlonger in question today.\n\nThere are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will\nactually look like in the end), but \"is it useful\" is no longer one of\nthose questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used\nit.\n\nYes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer\nworkloads and just from a \"it keeps finding embarrassing bugs\"\nstandpoint.\n\nBut the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing \"La La\nLa, I can't hear you\" at the top of your voice like some people seem\nto do.\n\nThe solution is to make sure those LLM tools _help_ maintainers\ninstead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side.\n\nWe're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore\npeople who try to argue against other people from using it.\n\nAnd no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the\nproblems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at\nthemselves at the same time.\n\nBecause it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.\n\nThe kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.\n\nSure, the social angle of working on open source is important and\noften a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a\nside benefit, not the _point_ of the project.\n\nThis is *NOT* some kind of \"social warrior\" project, never has been,\nand never will be.\n\nIn the kernel community we do open source because it results in better\ntechnology, not because of religious reasons.\n\nAnd so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear\nof new tools.\n\n              Linus (Torvalds)<\/code><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a lot of pretty heavy AI rhetoric these days. Some of the strongest anti-AI stances are coming from content creators\/artists and from game developers. The software developer community is more muted. It is also seeing that AI is completely disrupting their industry and likely to kill thousands of developer jobs forever, but they aren’t quite as vocally anti-AI. Why? Maybe its because most of us have been changing and adapting to big effort reducing technologies on a regular basis…<\/p>\n
 Read More  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-cool"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-4qB","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17025"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17152,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17025\/revisions\/17152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}