Linus Torvalds has blasted a proposed rule requiring Linux kernel contributors to declare their use of AI tools, calling such rules “utterly stupid” in a message to the kernel mailing list on October 13. The Register first reported the exchange.

The rule in question is the Assisted-by tag. Since January, the kernel’s documentation has asked anyone using “any sort of advanced coding tool” to add the tag to their commit message. Now the maintainers want it gone.

Sasha Levin, a kernel developer and Nvidia engineer, proposed the change in a mailing list patch on October 9. The patch has drawn more than 50 replies. “The Maintainers Summit reached consensus to deprecate the Assisted-by Tag,” Levin wrote. “Remove the documentation requiring it.”

Jeff Layton, a kernel developer at Red Hat, had already made the case for dropping it. He said not everyone follows the policy. He also said the tag “basically serves as free advertising for proprietary LLM companies,” and it is unclear why the kernel collects the information at all.

Pushback over enforcement

Laurent Pinchart, a kernel developer and founder of Ideas on Board, objected on October 13. He said he was not comfortable removing the tag without another mechanism for required disclosure. Without one, he wrote, he expected submitters to push back when asked about their tool use.

Pinchart acknowledged that some people will cheat. Still, he said the rule sets expectations, and the kernel has always had rules that some contributors break. “We’ve always had those, we’ll keep having them, and we’ll keep rejecting their contributions,” he wrote. “I really don’t get the unenforceable argument here.”

Torvalds replied that Pinchart’s position had “everything to do with your hangups.” He then proposed a rule of his own. “Here’s a new rule just for you: don’t use compilers for any of your kernel submissions,” he wrote. He added that contributors would have to write in assembler to prove they understand the machine, and that they should avoid editors for commit messages because backspace hides typing mistakes. The point, he said, was that people should do their best and understand their work, and that understanding has little to do with the tools they use.

Torvalds on his own AI use

The reply came days after Torvalds spoke at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague. On October 9, he sat down on stage with his friend Dirk Hohndel, head of Ericsson Software Technology. ZDNet was in the room.

Torvalds said he used to think AI was “just not very good.” That has changed. “Now I’m at the point where I actually really like using AI,” he said. He uses it for “the things that I’m bad at.” For a guitar pedal project, he wanted a modern interface on a small screen he had programmed in C. “I don’t do Java. I do kernels,” he said.

He called vibe coding “a wonderful way to find joy in programming” and described AI as a “gateway drug” for new programmers. He also cautioned against relying on it for serious work. “I think that you need to be very careful using AI when you’re doing something real and important,” he said.

On the kernel itself, Torvalds said AI tools now find real security bugs and flaws in drivers “that nobody has touched in 20 years,” according to TechRadar. Overall, he said, AI “is improving our code base.” But the tools carry a cost. “It is also stressing maintainers out to the point that it’s a problem,” he said.

At the Maintainers Summit the day before, roughly three quarters of the talks focused on making AI tools less stressful for maintainers, Torvalds said. Hohndel asked him about Sashiko, an agentic review system whose reviews now appear on the mailing list. Some subsystem maintainers expect patches to have gone through such a review, ZDNet reported. “People are jokingly saying that there are bots talking to bots, and it does actually happen,” Torvalds said.

Not every open source project is taking the same approach. System76 has banned AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop. NetBSD has banned AI-generated code since 2024. The Register reported that NetBSD has since received $120,282 in donations against a $50,000 target.

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