I think you may be misunderstanding the situation. He’s telling AI critics to stop complaining or fork. If that happens, the main branch will still have AI submissions, and the fork will be the AI-free one.
Important to note: Torvalds is not an LLM evangelist, nor does he just accept AI slop uncritically. The official policy is that LLM written/assisted code is fine, but the quality must hit the bar expected of Linux kernel submissions, and the submitter takes full responsibility for the code correctness whether they personally wrote it or not. Just submitting LLM code with no verification or tests is a great way of getting banned from submitting pull requests and getting a very angry email from Linus.
If they fork, they leave the main branch AI free, doing their own thing. This way the main branch does not go down the toilet with AI. This is good.
I think you may be misunderstanding the situation. He’s telling AI critics to stop complaining or fork. If that happens, the main branch will still have AI submissions, and the fork will be the AI-free one.
Important to note: Torvalds is not an LLM evangelist, nor does he just accept AI slop uncritically. The official policy is that LLM written/assisted code is fine, but the quality must hit the bar expected of Linux kernel submissions, and the submitter takes full responsibility for the code correctness whether they personally wrote it or not. Just submitting LLM code with no verification or tests is a great way of getting banned from submitting pull requests and getting a very angry email from Linus.