Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, recently issued a strong warning about the abuse of artificial intelligence tools while releasing a new open-source kernel version. He pointed out that a large number of repetitive error reports generated by AI are severely clogging the security reporting channel of the kernel, placing a significant ineffective workload on core maintainers.

Linus does not completely prohibit the use of AI in development. His main concern is the low barrier to entry for submissions. When developers simply rely on AI tools to scan out a bug in the system, other colleagues are also using the same tool to identify the same issue, leading to a continuous influx of massive duplicate reports on the security list.

Maintainers are caught in meaningless internal consumption, and daily management is nearly paralyzed

Faced with the flood of AI reports, kernel maintainers have to spend a lot of time forwarding issues repeatedly. They even need to repeatedly reply "This issue has already been fixed several weeks ago" and attach an open link, making daily maintenance almost unmanageable.

This week's routine kernel update progressed normally, with driver updates accounting for about half of the total, among which graphics processor updates were the most significant. However, the additional interference caused by AI reports has largely disrupted the originally efficient code review rhythm.

Reject superficial verbal contributions and advocate submitting patches

In response to this chaos, Torvalds provided clear constructive suggestions to developers in the open-source community, emphasizing that kernel development does not need those casual contributors who lack a true understanding of the underlying code. He believes that randomly throwing out problems using tools holds no real value for the community.

He called on developers who genuinely want to contribute value to the open-source community to first carefully read the relevant documentation. More importantly, while reasonably using AI tools, they must attach specific solutions and code patches when submitting reports.