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Torvalds: AI Is the New Compiler, Not the New Programmer
(pbxscience.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Tools are just tools; there are good ways and bad ways to use them. "Grok, go find bugs in the Linux kernel" isn't a good one. This isn't hard to understand...
There were many, partially well-intentioned, mostly fame-seeking, one-off 'projects' 'scanning' public repos and flooding them with low-quality low-effort PRs and issues; things that no human ever read until the a maintainer did.
"They made a poison and sold us a cure" is absolutely a valid criticism; that's two sides of the same coin. But pretending that he's being hypocritical or that LLMs aren't useful is just being wrong for the sake of hating AI
AI is useful as tool like he said, unfortunately these days in many organisations it is used as a replacement rather than a tool.
His conclusion was that as AI tools get more capable, the people who actually understand how systems work become more valuable, not less — because someone still has to review, maintain, and take responsibility for what the tools produce.
Humans still need to learn how to code.
I don't think that's true, but we simply disagree on that.
I don't think he's hypocritical. He simply doesn't have to deal with that negative impact he "warns" about. He is in support of using it as a tool and thinks the criticism is invalid. That's a consistent perspective, even if I don't agree with it.
If he used LLMs to create bug reports, but also complained about LLM written bug reports he gets, that would be hypocritical.