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Linus Torvalds Endorses AI Coding in Linux
At 18:13 · chapter starts 15:25
Linus Torvalds drew a public line in the sand on the Linux mailing list this week, stating that Linux is not an anti-AI project and that anyone who objects should fork it or leave. Leo Laporte frames this as a surprise — many in the open source world assumed Torvalds would be hostile to LLM-generated code. Harper Reed pushes back slightly, arguing the bell can't be unrung regardless of Torvalds' position. The discussion touches on the analogy to self-driving cars: just as some people ignore statistical evidence that Waymos are 10–15x safer than humans, some developers deny AI coding value despite the data. Alex Wilhelm adds a sharp observation: many people who say 'AI is bad at coding' tried ChatGPT once 18 months ago and haven't revisited the question.
Linus Torvalds drew a hard line on the Linux mailing list: Linux is not an anti-AI project. If you don't like it, fork it or leave. Coming from someone many expected to be skeptical of LLMs, this is as close to a final verdict as the open-source world gets.
