“It will also be a considerably painful instrument, each for maintainer workloads and simply from a ‘it retains discovering embarrassing bugs’ standpoint,” he mentioned of using AI in safety scanning. “The answer is to ensure these LLM instruments assist maintainers as an alternative of simply inflicting them ache.”
Builders ought to be free to decide on whether or not they use AI, he mentioned. “We’re not forcing anyone to make use of it, however I’ll very loudly ignore individuals who attempt to argue in opposition to different folks from utilizing it.”
Torvalds’ measured assist for AI doesn’t come utterly out of the blue: Across the similar time that he was complaining about AI distorting safety upkeep, he additionally spoke about its usefulness, claiming that it may improve programmer productivity by a factor of 10.