Linux kernel goes full AI slop code, hides chatbot commits
Linux is the name of a computer operating system kernel and a group of systems built on it, like Ubuntu or Mint. Linux is the basic infrastructure of the Internet. It’s important. A report just in from the Kernel Maintainers Summit on 8 October reveals just how full AI slop the Linux kernel project…
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Linux is the name of a computer operating system kernel and a group of systems built on it, like Ubuntu or Mint. Linux is the basic infrastructure of the Internet. It’s important. A report just in from the Kernel Maintainers Summit on 8 October reveals just how full AI slop the Linux kernel project has gone. And so has project leader Linus Torvalds. [LWN] Torvalds expects contributors to use well-funded chatbot coding: Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world. The project has also stopped marking chatbot commits to the kernel code. Kernel maintainers are complaining they’re drowning in slop. Torvalds’ answer is: less people, more chatbots! Torvalds said he is not trying to push non-chatbot users out of the project. But there’s already so much slop code and so many slop procedures that his actions don’t match these words. If you are trying to get off Windows onto a system that works better and faster, a version of Linux is still your least bad choice. Microsoft itself admits Linux is faster on games than Windows 11. [WIndows Central] But Linux going hard slop is bad news. How did we get here? Linus Torvalds has been AI curious for a while. He went on Linus Sebastian’s YouTube channel, Linus Tech Tips, in November last year. He was clearly well into the chatbot already: [YouTube] That’s reality. Deal with it. That genie is out of the bottle. You’re not getting it back. And you’re not getting it back whether you are a photographer who’s out of work. Those things are gone, right? Because you can fake pictures so much better now. Or you’re a programmer that has to learn to deal with a new reality. I think actually on the programming side, we’re in a fairly good spot. I really think that AI will be a tool and it will make people more productive. I think that vibe coding is great for getting into programming. I think it’s going to be a horrible thing to maintain. Torvalds’s first publicly released chatbot code was in January this year, when he vibe-coded a project in Python because he didn’t know enough Python. The programming language kids learn in high school. The guy who runs the kernel couldn’t get his head around Python. [GitHub] Kernel developers were trying to get chatbot code into the project for a while. Eventually the maintainers decided in April this year that they’d let it in if you labeled it with “Assisted-By.” [ZDNet] In July, Google engineers added an AI review bot called Sashiko. The bot would review contributors’ code patches and make comments. Contributors were expected to address the bot’s comments — whether they made sense or not — or the kernel maintainers would often just ignore their patch. This caused conflicts, which Torvalds firmly resolved in August: [lore.kernel.org] Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. … The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology. … This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be. “Social warrior” there is a version of the phrase “social justice warrior”, which is mainly used as a far-right dog-whistle. It was the one they used before “woke” or “DEI.” There is no way Torvalds doesn’t know what he was saying there. He’s also rewriting history. Linux launched and attracted its initial developers as a social movement. People worked hard to get a system with actual principles that wasn’t about screwing its users over. There were movies about this! Torvalds spoke in them! Claiming Linux was always pure technology with no social element is simply false. So the slop-gates were open. What sort of technical excellence did the antisocial warriors contribute? There’s this one from five days after Torvalds’ announcement. The message laments that the networking maintainers are drowning in slop — so they fixed this with more slop: [lore.kernel.org] We are completely overwhelmed, of course. The glimmer of hope is that we secured sufficient LLM budget and access (thank you Meta!) to run reviews with multiple frontier models on each patch. This eliminates some hallucinations. Thank you Meta! The message also suggests letting the chatbot commit code: start shifting focus to letting the LLMs take care of the busy work — managing patchwork, automating common process complaints, editing commit messages, and maybe applying patches which already got ‘reviewed-by’ tags from people we trust. Linux is not a social warrior project, it’s a Meta project! When your networking fails, remember to say: Thank you Meta! How much slop is in Linux now? The maintainer summit has decided you don’t need to know that. They’ve just removed requiring the “Assisted-By” tag. [lore.kernel.org] The “assisted-by” requirement was removed because contributors were ignoring it — and maintainers weren’t bothering to require it. Torvalds suggested the reason was: many submitters were simply ashamed to admit that they were using those tools. Imagine if there was something shameful about slop. The Linux kernel slop flood is causing the sort of problems that a flood of slop code and slop practices always causes. Torvalds’ answer is more slop: Linus Torvalds believes that blaming LLMs for the kernel community’s problems is wrong, when the problem is LLM users who do not understand how to use them or how the kernel works. A properly trained LLM is a useful tool, but it takes a lot of time to reach that point. … If you are a competent developer, he said, an LLM makes a great tool, but only after that effort has been put in to set it up. He resisted suggestions to post his LLM-training materials, saying that each developer needs to go through that process separately. The chatbot works great if you set it up right, you must be prompting it wrong! So Linus, can you share your setup? No you can’t? That’s great, Linus. So how do we encourage new contributors to join the kernel with these requirements? That’s the neat part — you don’t! Torvalds added that he does not want to scare off people who want to write code; his message is that you have to either put in the effort to learn, or put a lot of money into an LLM to participate. … Torvalds and others repeatedly said low-quality contributions from new developers should receive low priority, and that the community should stop trying to make contribution easy. It’s already hard to contribute to Linux if you’re not working for a corporation. Now that’s explicit. The end game for this is that the Linux kernel functionally becomes a closed shop. They don’t need new developers, new people all suck! Historically, this works for five to ten years, then the old developers start retiring or dying. It’s hard to know what to do in the meantime. If you just want off Windows, then Linux is still less bad and isn’t advertising at you in the start menu. Forking Linux is not easy. It’s not just copying the code, it’s building institutions to keep it maintained. Anyone who says “just fork it” is talking in bad faith. Myself, I use Debian Linux. It’s the system I make the Pivot to AI podcast on every day. Debian is also letting the slop in. So I’m running the older Debian Trixie, which is supported until 2028. I’ll be seeing what the landscape’s like then. [Debian] If you want a system that works like Linux, a lot of the Mastodon nerds are trying NetBSD, which is a mature and robust project which loathes AI slop. You do basically have to be a nerd. NetBSD does not support nearly as much hardware as Linux. Running your games in Wine is hit and miss. The Nvidia drivers are bad. It’s a bit like Linux was in 2000 or so. [NetBSD] I suggest the social action: shame. Shame these people. Their actions are shameful. AI bros hate being shamed and they try to make rules against shaming — because shame works. None of these people doing shameful things deserve a place in polite company. They should be shamed for their shameful choices. The AI industry is also running a PR push to redefine common word usage. The word “slop” is also super effective — so the bros really hate “slop” and try to define it to mean slop they don’t like. But all AI output is slop. It’s social spam. That’s what it’s for. It’s slop! Say “slop” every time. The Linux AI slop brain rot will collapse with the AI bubble. You see these bozos comment on Linux Weekly News with dumb AI promotional tropes like “AI is here to stay” as if the bubble will go on forever. But the crash is foreordained by the finances. Linux nerds, go read the finance press for once. Even if AI was everything they say it is — and it isn’t — the investor money is running out, and you can’t service hundreds of billions of dollars in debt with five billion in audited revenue. The cheap chatbots are going away and the vendors will stop releasing open-weight local models as loss leaders. Can the Linux Foundation afford to run local models for its developers, models that are no longer trained and are aging out of usefulness, at ten or more times the cost? Good luck to them. The guys who did all this will try to say “never mind.” But you already know their judgement is fatally defective. They worked for a world where the rest of us are devalued and discarded. They will still warrant shame. They need not to be trusted again. As Linus Torvalds didn’t quite say in 2003: [NYT, archive] Really, I’m not out to suck as much ass as Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect. Video — Podcast