'The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable': Linus Torvalds laments how people are wasting the Linux team's time with LLMs
Overview & Key Takeaways
Linux's creator isn't against the use of AI tools, he's just tired of folks using them and then doing nothing with what they've discovered
In the world of software, it's common knowledge that Linus Torvalds isn't one to mince his words, and in a post about the latest kernel release candidate on the Linux mailing list archive, he was critical about people using AI tools to find bugs or other issues. Not because they used AI in the first place, but because countless people are essentially submitting messages that basically just say, 'here's a bug.'
The missive in question (via The Register) starts with a note about how new drivers make up roughly half of the kernel update, especially GPU ones, with the rest of the changes covering "networking, core kernel, filesystems, and arch updates."
From there, Torvalds turns his attention to documentation updates, or rather, one very specific element of it: "The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous duplication due to different people finding the same things with the same tools."
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Linux's creator explains that the use of AI tools isn't the issue: it's just that it is something that numerous other people are also doing, and the constant influx of messages that are effectively nothing more than 'I used AI and it found this bug' is just wasting everyone's time and effort to process.
Torvalds has no problem with the use of AI in software development, and for many engineers and full-time coders, LLMs are a great way of offloading some of the drudgery of the job or for testing out ideas before committing to a task. The problem here is that almost anyone can use a large language model to scan through millions of lines of code and find an issue or two somewhere.
"If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too," Torvalds notes. "If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on top of what the AI did."
It wouldn't surprise me if the Linux team ultimately end up creating a tool that automatically filters all such submissions, rejecting those that don't offer code solutions to the problems that AI has found.
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And if that tool just so happens to be an AI-based one, then so much the better.
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