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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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This might get me banned here but I mostly agree with him
AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong
But used right, it can be a huge benefit. We know how deeply checked and tested all code is (who doesn't remember the continuous Linus rants?) so why does it matter if submitted code covers a bug that was discovered through AI, or even written by AI? As long as the code checkers know and understand what happens, I dont see the problem with the code having been written by a tool
Obligatory AI doesn't exist, its LLM's, and LLM's are tools, and tools are fine as long as you use them well.
If companies suddenly started making two meter long chainsaws and people started running around with these chainsaws cutting little girls in half, then yeah, people would rightly question if we shouldn't ban those tools too.
Force AI companies to be responsible for how their products are used and wait to see how fast things would get better.
And for developers: as long as every commit is reviewed and checked by humans, to me its just another tool being used to make Linux better
For those arguing the water of energy and the theft of intellectual property, it's the same point: governments need to put rules in place to control the stupid growth of data centers, AI companies must be held yo account for the data they've stolen, absolutely. However, that doesn't mean that LLM's are tools without any use
Maybe if the tool is so finicky that it's practically impossible to get right, it's a bad tool? For sure millions of programmers are just prompting it wrong... Can't be that it's just not as great a tool as the AI overlords claim
Until the code checkers resort to LLMs because the agentic coders submit so much code for review. I will just let AI run over this one time, what could go wrong? I'll tell AI to generate test cases beforehand to make sure it gets the implementation right. Bad tests never lead to problems right?
Or maybe, just maybe people eating up a constant stream of propaganda produced by those whose whole financial future is tied to AI being the universal solution to every problem (and some they have to create in the first place) are indeed a problem.
Just because 24/7 advertising tells you to hammer in screws doesn't mean it's the smart thing to do. And neither does it show how useless a hammer is as a tool.
He's right about the tool aspect of it, but, and I cannot emphasise this enough, it is not just a tool. Though we all bow (or salivate) before our fake materialist gods, and cast aside the beauty and relationships in the world, things are more than just their function.
I don't think the arguments against it had no basis. It's clear that those tools have become really useful, but a huge chunk of those arguments are ethical about the environmental and economic impact.
What I'm seeing is that those arguments are beign faded out, along with those that talked about it as if LLMs didn't work as expected.
They are clearly useful now, and it can't be said that they aren't anymore, but those example that Linus gave minify the other problems and it makes it seems that anyone that does not abide by AI is a fool and an elitist, which I don't think that's the case.
I think that this position makes how you wrote your matter for some people.
Generated code was trully bad. These days? Not so much anymore...
Better tools, more acceptance.
The old rusted farm equipment surrounded the house predicting its demise.
Because the public discussion devolved into some insane fight between people ideologically against any AI (funnily often the argument "it's stealing other people's work" is coming from people that are fundamentally against copyrights in every other case) and some not less crazy people believing that AI is their new lord and savior (and a lot of them are paid or the followers to said paid influencers you just changed one idol (tech billionaires) to another one as instructed...).
It's basically a mud fight between those believing that hammers are inherently evil and need to be destroyed and those that think everything in this world is a nail. Nothing in-between.
I think you are critically (I'm not saying intentionally) missing the middle ground in your assessment. Large generative models are great for repetitive, homogenous tasks like surveillance, speech recognition, assembly line quality control, etc.
If I try to look at it from your point of view, regarding creative tasks like developing new software, you have one side claiming that you can make hammers out of chocolate and throw away all your proper ones, and another that's portrayed as being unreasonable for opposing that.
I'm not missing the middle ground. I am criticising that there is no middle ground in this fake discussion manufactured to keep engagement going.
Every single time someone makes a nuanced argument that is not matching one of the two dogmatic extremes (so exactly that Linus Torvalds is doing here, just –Linus being Linus– not very diplomatically phrased) the same kind of people start screaming about the end of the world (see again: this very thread where idiots express their condolences for Linus finally going insane by not denouncing AI alongside those praising the fact that he finally has seen the light an embraces AI as our saviour).
It's so funny when they try to argue that the conditions around it are somehow different and make it unethical. Like yeah, I'm against fascism and climate change, but all our previous tooling was also built on unethical grounds, this isn't any different. You like trains? The railroads were built by slave labor, extracting the fuel displaces indigenous people and hurts the environment, and folks like Carnegie used their train-powered wealth for their own personal benefit to the detriment of the public. Does that mean taking a train is unethical?
Things were bad before AI, so let's make them worse.