Person
Finnish-American software engineer who created the Linux kernel in 1991 and remains its lead maintainer, overseeing its ongoing development.
Sasha Levin's 9 October patch to deprecate the Linux kernel's Assisted-by AI tag has drawn more than 50 replies. The argument is over one line in a commit message, and it hands teams writing AI policies two opposed models to copy.
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Linus Torvalds submitted Claude Code-assisted patches that lift synthetic page-cache reads 23-fold, to 304 million a second. He warned real workloads will gain far less, and reviewers have since reported a race condition.
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Linus Torvalds built an experimental Linux page-cache branch with Claude Code that cuts one contended read test to about a quarter of its CPU cost. His own cover letter flags open problems, so the series is a request for review.
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Linus Torvalds says Claude Code largely wrote Linux page-cache patches that cut kernel cycles per read from about 2,950 to 725 in his test. The branch was still outside mainline 7.3-rc6 on October 13, so the kernel has not yet taken the code.
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Linus Torvalds says he likes using AI, though three-quarters of a day of kernel maintainer talks went to making AI generation and review less stressful. Teams writing an AI policy can turn his line on serious code into a test of who ends up checking the output.
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Anthropic has launched OSS Scanner, a free opt-in service that sends open-source maintainers AI vulnerability reports no human has reviewed. The triage Anthropic skips falls to maintainers, so downstream teams should expect more upstream findings that a person still has to confirm.
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Linus Torvalds said selftests make up a quarter of the Linux 7.3-rc5 patch by line count, a split he called unusual. A few very large test patches produce that share, so the size of the rc alone gives teams planning for 7.3 little reason to wait.
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A model that quits is harder to audit than a model that lies, because a refusal leaves no artifact to check. The Xe driver fix shows the quitting verdict can be flatly wrong.
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Sean Goedecke argues that visible anger gets you excluded from the conversations where the interesting work is handed out, and the awkward part is that his own essay rates those engineers above average at shipping, so no dashboard catches the loss.
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Linux now has trailer keywords for AI-assisted patches. The interesting part is not the tag, it is that a human has to put it there and existing scripts already parse the field.
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The scheduler change is throughput you get for the cost of an upgrade. The more durable news is that late-cycle patch volume is now permanently larger, and the maintainer has stopped fighting it.
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