“So just to make it really clear: If you found a bug using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too. 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. Don’t be the drive-by ‘send a random report with no real understanding’ kind of person. OK?”
Makes sense to me, most of the time the AI output need to be used as input for a human who can then deliver the real value, or at least verify the correctness of the AI output.
@anamethatisnt @cm0002 And besides that, many people burning energy totally needless…
But, at least more script kiddies feeling important…The funny thing is that this is the ONE usecase where LLMs can’t themselves make anything worse, because if used sensibly it’s basically just a black box that pokes at your software until something breaks, the whole point is to break things!
But of course AI-users can’t even fucking handle that, they’re so utterly incapable of doing any work themselves that “look at the thing and write down things that go wrong and why it went wrong, and check if it has already been reported before submitting your own report” is too much for them to handle.
The morons spamming the list aren’t going to read that either, unfortunately.
the linked source is the kernel mailing list.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/5/17/896"
From Linus Torvalds <>Date Sun, 17 May 2026 14:29:22 -0700
Subject Linux 7.1-rc4
You all know the drill by now - another week, another release candidate.
Things continue to look fairly normal (where “normal” is the “new
normal” with a fair amount of changes). Drivers are about half the
patch, with GPU leading the way as is tradition. But there’s a little
bit of everything in driver land.The rest is mostly networking, core kernel, filesystems, and arch updates.
Some of the documentation updates might be worth highlighting: 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. People
spend all their time just forwarding things to the right people or
saying “that was already fixed a week/month ago” and pointing to the
public discussion.Which is all entirely pointless churn, and we’re making it clear that
AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and
treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody
involved - and only makes that duplication worse because the reporters
can’t even see each other’s reports.AI tools are great, but only if they actually help, rather than cause
unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work. Feel free to use
them, but use them in a way that is productive and makes for a better
experience.The documentation may be a bit less blunt than I am, but that’s the
core gist of it. So just to make it really clear: if you found a bug
using AI tools, the chances are somebody else found it too. 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. Don’t be the
drive-by “send a random report with no real understanding” kind of
person. Ok?- Linus
"
Better get an AI to manage the mailbox then eh /s
Ironically, this is probably the way it is going to go. As we keep going deeper into the information age, managing all the information thrown at us is becoming unmanageable. With the introduction of AI it will get worse, even as AI becomes the only way of handling the influx of information. Using machine learning has been a way to sort information for a long time (spam sorting is a type of AI after all) and present generative AI are an evolution of that.
I dont think thats necessarily true.
FWIW im team “AI can be a useful tool”, but on the day when other people’s chat bots start emailing my chat bot who summarises it for me im just going to go throw my laptop in the river.
I think Linus has kind of addressed it: if you found it with a tool then we already found it.
Maybe im being naive. IDK. Im so sick of tech just generally.
I call my AI “ctrl-a delGPT”
Actually… Not a bad idea
This is how many spam filters have worked for a very long time. Using an LLM to help with classification could be a real option.
It wouldn’t help with determining which security reports are slop and which are real, though.
It’s worth mentioning that the recent high CVE privilege escalation bugs were discovered by AI.
There is some good, but it’s important that the submitters include very clear POCs to make verification trivial for maintainers.
In the hands of experienced researchers, AI can be good.
AI is like any other tool, in the hands of an expert for whatever domain they’re using it for, good things can happen.
But like any other tool, in the hands of an amateur, who knows what could happen lmao
Didn’t he say it’s okay to submit AI slop code “as long as submitters take responsibility”? Didn’t he also say AI writes better code than him?
If this wasn’t an invitation to submit slop code PRs, I don’t know what it was.
You asked for it and now you have it.
I guess it’s time to use AI to manage that mailing list…
A completely false and reductionist interpretation of what he said.
Didn’t he also say AI writes better code than him?
Unless I’m mistaken, he said that about Python. He doesn’t usually write Python, see the commit message here: torvalds/AudioNoise@4e524250.
What a fucking headline. Just wow. Care to mention the context and the part where he said it was helpful?
maybe he will finally stop using a fucking mailing list then
Only “almost” so it’s still fine. /j
