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“The AI says we could…” I hear it a lot. It’s bullshit. Not the suggestion. The sentence.
This month the Linux kernel stopped asking whether your code was written by AI. Good. That was never the question. The question is who signs for it.
Before AI, we all knew this moment. You’re stuck, you have tried everything that rationally made sense, and then you try something that doesn’t. Something that once felt related, even though you can explain why it isn’t. We’d say: I don’t know anymore, let me try this and see if it gives more insight. Sometimes the only argument was gut feeling. And that was fine. It can’t get more broken, and you can (usually) go back.
When an AI suggestion clicks with you, that’s the same gut. Your knowledge and depth are what give it a chance. If you thought it was bullshit, you wouldn’t test it. So own it.
Go read the kernel mailing list archives. Good patches, bad patches and legendary flamewars, long before any LLM. AI changes none of that. It only lets more people submit work they can’t judge. Don’t understand what you’re handing in? Stop. You don’t operate a crane without training. Or operate on a patient.
Torvalds just sent in a patch he built with Claude Code. Reviewers found a race condition. The process works, even on Linus.
Linus put it plainly: he expects people to “understand what they are doing.”
So the kernel dropped its AI label. “The AI did it” now answers a question nobody asks. What’s left is Signed-off-by: the one line no AI is allowed to add. It carries your name.
Next time someone says “the AI suggests…”, ask them what they suggest.
Best “the AI said so” you’ve heard this year? Drop it below.
Signed-off-by: Steph Janssen
The sources: the decision from the Linux Maintainers Summit in Prague (8 October), with Torvalds calling an AI ban “UTTERLY STUPID”, via XDA Developers. And his own Claude Code patch plus the race condition the reviewers found, via The New Stack.
The line that did not fit above, from the kernel’s own guidance for AI assistants: “AI agents MUST NOT add Signed-off-by tags. Only humans can legally certify.”
For the doers: add one question to your change or code review template. “Can you explain this without the tool that wrote it?” If the answer is no, so is the merge.