'I'm not a programmer' anymore: Linus Torvalds on the only two tools he uses now

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Linus has no interest in supporting obsolete hardware or software.
• While Rust is important, it's no panacea for bad programming logic.
• Linux developers have adopted AI tools for maintenance work. 

MUMBAI -- At Open Source Summit India 2026, Linux creator Linus Torvalds and his friend Dirk Hohndel discussed the current state of Linux and where it's headed.

Linux 7.1: Slow and steady, not splashy

The conversation opened with Hohndel asking about what Torvalds thought about the Linux 7.1 release. Torvalds said he doesn't think in terms of blockbuster releases: "For me, the highlight has been that it's been a very steady progression of continued improvements." He stressed that since they created the Git version control system, "We don't do releases that have big new splashy features, and I actually actively try to avoid that kind of model; we want to have this kind of incremental improvement and steady progress all the time."

Also: Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days - and never imagined it would last 20 years

AI is, however, pressuring this workflow. "It's been getting a bit harder lately because of AI finding interesting bugs, and that has stressed out people in the community," Torvalds added, even as the kernel continues its "steady release schedule" every nine to ten weeks.

Merge windows, fixes, and personality bugs

Torvalds described his work pattern during kernel merge windows: "Over two weeks, I do roughly 200 merges. That's a very rough ballpark number." 

Even with decades of trust in maintainers, he pushes back on last‑minute changes: "If it's not a really important fix, please queue it for the next release instead of sending me last-minute fixes," because "fixes… may not be worth the slight chance that it causes a new problem."

Also: Linux 7.1 is here to end the Intel 486 CPU era - and do some serious legacy clean up

The technical load doesn't bother him as much as human issues: "New code is a technical problem… we can fix those… What tends to stress me out is that occasionally we have personality issues, and trust me, code is easy to fix. Personality is not always as easy to fix." Torvalds admits he's caused some of those problems himself, although he's worked on that.

'I'm not a programmer, I'm a development lead'

Here's another thing that's changed: Torvalds no longer sees himself as a programmer. "Let's be entirely honest. I hardly read code at all anymore. I'm not a programmer, I'm a development lead."

He still writes small patches, but they're more guidance than authority: "I still write code in the sense that I send people patches… but then I make it very clear that, hey, this is a suggestion. This is untested… I expect the maintainers of the code to be the ones who then send me the fix back. So I very seldom commit my own code anymore."

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What matters most to him is understanding intent: "When I do a pull request, I want to understand the bigger picture. It's one of the reasons I ask for pull requests with very good explanations: I will read them. I want to understand what's going on."

He said he dives into code mainly when something forces his attention, like build breaks or merge conflicts: "I've done so many conflict resolutions over the years that I could probably do them in my sleep… Quite often at that point, when I look at the code, I sometimes find issues."

NTFS and cleaning out the museum pieces

On the long-troublesome Microsoft NTFS subsystem, Torvalds joked that "NTFS has been kind of a problem child over the years, where finding people to maintain it has sometimes been problematic."

He continued, "We have two different groups maintaining two different versions of NTFS, and both of them work, and I'm just letting them fight it out and see which one comes on top, or maybe, maybe both will stay around for a long time."

"I'm not very sentimental when it comes to technology," Torvalds added. "We're slightly more active in trying to drop support for hardware that literally nobody uses anymore, except in museum environments."

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While he's "a firm believer in maintaining hardware support as long as we have users," he argued that "at a certain point, the cost of maintaining support for old hardware just becomes too much of a burden," pointing to the decision that "in 7.2 we will no longer support the machines that did not have hardware floating point on x86," such as the 486 SX released "literally over 30 years ago."

That's part of a broader effort to remove obsolete code from Linux. For example, support for networking standards such as ISDN and ATM is being discontinued. However, if you still use older tech -- there's doubtless someone still running Linux on a 386 somewhere -- you can still do so with older kernels. 

Git, C, Rust, and 'hack and slash'

As to how he does his work, Torvalds said simply: "Git and email are the two really only tools I use. I use Google as a way to look things up." He added, "I'm unusual; most of the other maintainers end up using many more tools, and I think a lot of them are starting to use AI tools for patch checking," while he "works at a higher level. I work with people, not tools."

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When asked about Rust both in Git and the kernel, he pushed back against hype: "I'm not sure Rust is going to take over the world. I still think Rust is very interesting, [but] I still find C to be a much simpler tool."

Torvalds continued, "I'm much more excited about all the tools we have for verification of C," including "automated patch verification tools" and "automated email checking tools for patches like Sashiko."

Summing up, Torvalds told the Mumbai audience: "I'm more of a hack-and-slash kind of person, and I still like the raw and simple power of C, and I don't think that's going to change."

Rust won't save you from logic bugs

Torvalds also warned against overestimating Rust's benefits: "Rust fixes a few easy bugs that you can make in C, but it does not fix the logic errors, right? It does not think for you, and when you write incorrect code, the language does not matter. The end result will be incorrect."

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On mixed C/Rust code bases, he pointed out that guarantees are limited: "The guarantees that Rust give you only apply in the Rust-only parts of your code base, and wherever you interact with C code, all bets are off," with most Rust code in Linux talking to "core kernel C code" that is "much better quality… because that code has been tested in every single environment."

He added that "some of our big and more high-profile bugs in the kernel lately have been logic errors… It was just bad programming, which sadly happens even in carefully maintained subsystems and important kernels that are supposed to be very secure."

AI, LLMs, and 'junk' versus real bugs

Finally, after 26 minutes without talking about AI and LLMs, Hohndel and Torvals dove in. For starters, Torvalds revised his recent comments about large language models (LLMs), stressing that his "10x" figure for LLM productivity was "not scientific… that was pulled out of my ass number, obviously." 

Today, he continued, "we're at the point where hopefully it creates more productivity than it takes away," but "we certainly saw more junk being generated by LLMs than we saw useful code up until the like early this year." A major pain point was bogus reports. "You get these bug reports that look entirely valid, and it actually can take quite a lot of effort to figure out that was just hallucination, and 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."

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Even now, he said, "most of the good ones require more than just the LLM," because "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, he uses LLMs as prototypers: "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," while insisting that for kernel‑level fixes, "LLMs, in my experience, have not been at that level yet."

Embarrassing bugs and not shooting the messenger

Torvalds acknowledged that some AI‑found issues have been "absolutely, stunningly, I mean, interesting in a painful kind of way," especially security problems that "show up in the technology press two days later."

Despite the embarrassment, he said, "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."

Also: Linus Torvalds blasts kernel dev for 'making the world worse' with 'garbage' patches

In recent months, he added, "we've had LLM point out several bugs that were all related," as different people iterated on the same areas of the kernel, and "that's why we had three or four very closely related bugs that became big news within a couple of weeks."

Godzilla, India, and 'toy projects'

Torvalds closed on a lighter note, saying he uses AI "for my own toy projects," including family photos: "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."

He concluded, "There are many useful and less useful uses for AI," and "I think Godzilla is a great place to stop."