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Linus Torvalds Working On A Hefty Linux Kernel Improvement With Claude Code
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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2026
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Almost anyone can cut and paste a face on a different body using a classic photo editor.
It still takes a profesional to do it in a way that delivers a quality result.
Linus Torvalds is a professional, the linux terminal is his baby, if we can trust anyone on this, its him.
The amateurs using ai to produce slop that resembles what we perceive as quality, is sometimes hard to tell but 25 years ago people though half life 1 looked insanely realistic and that graphics could not possibly look any more real. Over time our brains will adapt and we will be able to tell slop from real work in a heartbeat. I bet most people here can already tell if a mail was written by an llm and not audited by a human with ease.
We didn't think Half Life 1 looked realistic against reality, just that it was the most realistic graphics we had seen yet.
It's not like we looked at the game and went that's indistinguishable from reality.
Considering that the word points to just about anyone who has been doing a thing for money for a while, I'd suggest you look for a better word.
Expert?
Gamers often use “pro” which comes from profesional, i never really saw a connection with money there.
I guess nowadays you need to be in the category of "obsessive person", to even try to get any doable quality of code.
Considering that words like "competent" or "careful" or even "perfectionist" don't apply to me and I would guess Linus is putting more effort than me, to keep his codebase clean.
but isn't using AI inherently unethical?
Yes, and the people doing mental gymnastics to defend it are unprincipled losers and/or cucks to the billionaires.
The models used to generate code were built by stealing from us. Fuck whatever stupid opinions you might have on copyright; you were exploited. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, etc are making money, corrupting our democracy, and destroying our way of life because they stole our work. They wouldn't be able to do that without the massive theft of labor they've committed, or if our government actually enforced the laws that they broke, and are currently still breaking.
Why should these scumbags (or anyone) be able to steal and profit from our labor? Are we going to accept our assigned roles as mere cattle for the megacriminals? Will you be happy when your daughter is conscripted as a "breeder" for Elon Musk? Or when your son dies fighting in a war for resources so we can build more data centers?
Or how about when the subsidized tokens run out, you can't afford to use the models you've become unable to function without, and are forced to go work in an Amazon warehouse or copper mine or some shit because you eagerly and enthusiastically contributed to the monopolization of your own labor, and were too stupid to realize it before it was too late?
My subjective opinion is that yeah it is unethical, but not more then so many other things we normalised.
Systematicly slaughtering animals for meat for example.
I am not a vegitarian by any means. You cannot fight on all fronts at once and have to pick your own battles in context of your own lifes challenges.
Cars poison the air and kill many people, i dont drive a car for that reason because thats a fight i can fight. I have sensativities with food, so i am not cutting out meat. (I aim to do so some day)
I moved to linux some years ago by getting help from an llm which requires datacenters build by malicious companies. I don't have a google or meta account and my cloud and media is hosted locally on recycled hardware. Where for others those services require datacenters build by malicious companies.
Life is various shades of grey.
I understand the theft argument and I don't really endorse AI code but I will say one thing and this is genuine question. Isn't coding predominantly theft? You can figure out how to do something you look on Stick exchange and copy what you find solve problem, done.
Maybe in some perspective but could not be further from mine.
All non personal Informations should be free.
Code is just information, who is one person to tell me i cannot arrange letters and words in a certain order because they did it first.
In context, i was already firmly opposed to the concept of copyright long before llms became consumer accesible. Imitation is the greatest honor someone csn receive.
I often get a question about “means to live”when i mention that. In short i think all people deserve the means to live comfortably regardless of economic output or labor.
I dont propose to change the current system overnight though, i would need to write a couple of books to fully explain the gradual transformation to the zero profit society i envision.
I think you've derived the wrong point from my stance.
Theft. In my eyes. Is on a sort of sliding scale with regard to ethics.
Stealing from an individual is reprehensible. Stealing from a corporation that nets more than one billion dollars annually? You have a moral imperative to take whatever you can get from them.
I day "Steal" more affectionately with respect to coding. Context matters deeply. Data should be free dah. And the socialism. Good.
Oh sure, thats a miscommunication error then.
I wouldnt call it stealing myself but i can find myself in your definition.
I'm worried about cognitive surrender. There's evidence of people losing skills they once had because they stopped doing it themselves and just get AI to do it for them.
"Using AI for Just 10 Minutes Erodes Your Ability to Persist at Hard Things": https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/using-ai-just-10-minutes-erodes-your-ability-persist-hard-things
They should run the test with calculators, because they'll see the same effect. Turns out that giving people a tool to make things trivial, and then taking that tool away, halfway through the goddamn exam, is a lot more frustrating than just asking them to do some algebra on paper.
'Bicycling for just ten miles makes walking back seem like a pain in the ass.'
going to just copy and paste my reply to your other comment: AI is not a tool it is a replacement, there’s no skill in using AI
If you give up all critical thinking to the LLM, than it is indeed a replacement, but there are lots of ways you can use AI without giving up all your critical thinking.
And it always takes skill to be able to evaluate the results of an LLM.
so you didn't look at the study, ok
If he's still auditing and understanding the code. Something that he's done as a project manager for decades at this point. I don't see how it will. If the code is generated by a person or a machine. The auditing isn't much different.
Ironically, I find the LLMs to be better at auditing code than generating it in the first place. Like the humans they trained under, LLMs make mistakes and miss important things in both endeavors, but: when an LLM finds a real problem, that's a win no matter how you look at it.
Definitely. I just hope that sooner rather than later it's possible for them all to move over to local open source models. Supporting wasteful content thieves is not sustainable.
That and that all the GPU manufacturers Etc have their sound blaster moment. These days a lot of socs have quite powerful Graphics accelerators on them. At some point, someone's going to release a bit of silicon equivalent to the AC 97. May not have been able to compete with sound blaster on the ridiculously high end of the market. But was good enough for 99% of tasks. So that most people don't even remember sound blaster anymore. Even though they still technically exist.
I have been using "onboard graphics" professionally in our products, including products which do 3D rendering, since 2014.
I think GPUs have a little longer life than sound blaster cards still in them, massive arrays of relatively simple CPUs have more purposes than just graphics rendering.
I searched what sound blaster is, but I don't really understand it. Are they a company that made audio cards in the ancient times? I think I remember some people said that having audio cards was not standard.
Their website seems to have weird hardware targeted at gamers.
Maybe they sell audio interfaces? But I'm confused why gamers of all people would be the target group. I got an audio interface for my guitar myself and some MIDI things.
Back in the DOS days and early windows days. They were one of the gold standards for PC audio. Even if you didn't own a sound blaster card, you likely owned a clone that emulated one. They were the bees knees so to speak when it came to PC gaming.
But by the late 90s the company had spread itself so thin on branding and other things. Sound blaster CDROM drives? Yep. Sound blaster video cards? Yep. Etc Etc Etc. They tried to parlay being a lucky defacto standard into something else. Wanted to be a premium brand. Prices go up, quality goes down. Kinda like Nvidia now. Fake frames, AI slop, shitting on traditional customers.
Turn of the century and a standard set in 97 finally started rolling out on consumer motherboards. No longer when you bought your computer if you wanted it to make anything more than basic beeps boops and buzzes. Did you have to go out and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get an ad in card. It was on board. On the motherboard.
The newest computer I own is an early ryzen from the previous Dark Times. Not to be confused with these dark times. So I don't have first-hand experience. But it is my understanding that Intel integrated Graphics isn't quite the joke is that it used to be. Just a bastard stepchild that Intel can't decide if they really want to support of not. And some AMD chips have an APU on it which is similar. But still chokes under anything very intense. It's getting close. But just not quite. Give us a truly standardized setup with the basic power of a mid 2010s graphics accelerator and vulkan api, most people would be in business.
Honestly I'm hoping something along this line happens and becomes common with risc-v systems. Like Mali with arm.
Thank you for the explanation.
I have a laptop from 2022 with an Intel CPU. It's pretty good to what laptops did last decade. You can play Factorio, Minecraft and RimWorld for example in pretty reasonable graphics. It's not that great of course, but it works fine, especially if my laptop didn't have heating issues (framework 12)
yeah I agree with this statement. it’s not that LLM are necessarily bad it’s making people reliant and lazy which leads to complacency.
Pretty much the whole point of every invention in the industrial revolution.
Absolutely not. Lots of thing were created to make jobs faster and more importantly faster.
Take the simple washing machine for example. Early iteration, before electric washing machine, caused a lot of injuries because people would get their arm stuck in the machine's mechanism.
So by creating the modern washing machine, we freed lot of time for people to do less menial stuff and made their life safer by not having your arm pushing clothes through a dangerous machine.
or the cotton gin, or the steam engine...
Now one wo/man + machine can do the work of ten wo/men... and 9 wo/men were freed up to "do less menial stuff" - and not get paid (or enslaved) for it.
Only in the sense using a calculator makes you worse at long division. You're still doing math.
Every pearl-clutching article like 'doctors got worse at spotting cancer when we gave them a tool and then took it away' is only measuring before and after. None of them seem interested in asking: how much more cancer did they find, with the tool?
AI is not a tool it is a replacement, there's no skill in using AI
Weird how software engineers are better at 'being replaced' than novices. They seem to get better results by knowing what it's supposed to be doing.
What a funny coincidence.
It’s already too late. He’s gone down the rabbit hole.
I can vouch for that: As a programmer, I can generally see both programming AI and general LLM use if it was copy-pasted. I know a guy who isn't a programmer who've used Claude Code to make an app, and things are working, but it's sooo clear even to a junior SE that it's vibe-coded. There's a clear lack of consistency, architecture, maintainability, and general human readability.
However, if the code/text was reviewed and edited by a capable human programmer, it's incredibly difficult to single out what is a product of AI and not.
Actual programmers who understand and can write code themselves who use AI simply as a tool, NOT a shortcut, will produce indistinguishable code. Linus is an incredibly smart and capable guy, and for specific uses, I'm confident in him using this tool responsibly.
(The ethics of AI use is a different topic however...)
How do you see the longevity of it. You obviously learnt how to code before ai. What about those learning now that are learning only having access to ai. Id anticipate the quality over time will deteriorate
I think we'll unfortunately see a degradation over time of capable programmers, as it's with most other things: Humans learn poorly from seeing things being done for them, rather than doing it themselves. AI can be a good resource for iteration and a sort of rubber duck, and even for explaining things (with external confirmation). But as it currently stands, people find it much more attractive to just let AI do the work for them. That's the most prominent work culture after all, based on capitalistic values: Economic growth above all.
I see it in schools as well, unfortunately: Students find it much more appealing to get good grades than to actually learn. Not everyone, of course, but still way too many.
And I do understand many of the students: The bar for junior programmers has now increased, as a lot of employers simply think "why hire a human that is on the same level as AI?".
Because there is a direct impact on your chances for a better life. Having better grades give you access to better schools (and in the US, scholarships as well).
The emphasis of our school system is results.
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