IT’s Mr Sweary, Linus Torvalds once said LLMs might deliver a 10x jump in programmer productivity but now admits that the number was “just pulled from his arse.”
Speaking at Open Source Summit India 2026, Torvalds now says the number was “not scientific,” according to ZDNet.
“That was pulled out of my arse number, obviously,” Torvalds said.
Torvalds said things had improved, but not enough to let the AI cheerleaders start waving their little flags.
He said: “we’re at the point where hopefully it creates more productivity than it takes away.”
Torvalds said the kernel crowd had “certainly seen more junk being generated by LLMs than we saw useful code up until early this year… it can actually be a huge drain on resources when it takes humans a lot of effort to figure out that, hey, this machine-generated report was not true.”
Even now, Torvalds said, “most of the good ones require more than just the LLM.”
He said: “we’ve had to push back quite a bit… if you find a bug with an LLM, it’s not enough to just ask the LLM to make a bug report and then throw it over the fence to us. We want to see a suggested patch; we want to see the human who ran the LLM act as a kind of back-and-forth.”
Torvalds described many AI-generated patches as “mindless band-aid kind of patches… they may fix the immediate problem, but the kind of bug remains, and it just is waiting in the hallway to hit you in another place.”
For his own toy projects, Torvalds treats LLMs as quick prototype engines rather than magical code goblins.
“I use them as a way to prototype things… quite often the code is not usable in that form, but it’s a great way to try something out,” Torvalds said.
Kernel-level fixes are another story, because the Linux kernel is not the place for vibes, wishful thinking and paste-from-chatbot bravado.
“LLMs, in my experience, have not been at that level yet,” he said.
Torvalds admitted some AI-found bugs had been “absolutely, stunningly, I mean, interesting in a painful kind of way.”
Some security problems then “show up in the technology press two days later,” which is not exactly a relaxing morning for maintainers.
Still, Torvalds is not blaming the software sniffer dogs for finding something smelly.
“I’m very much not a shoot-the-messenger kind of person. I think we’re much better off with LLMs finding bugs, even when they are embarrassing, and they are things that we should probably have found two decades ago,” Torvalds said.
Torvalds said he was using AI “for my own toy projects… Every time I travel to some new place, and this is the first time I’ve been to India, I send the kids pictures of where I am, and for some strange reason, Godzilla seems to follow me around and gets added to those pictures.”
“There are many useful and less useful uses for AI,” Torvalds said. I think Godzilla is a great place to stop,” he said.
