Speaking at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America, Linux creator Linus Torvalds said modern AI tools are reshaping how developers work on the kernel, driving up contribution volume and exposing new social and security stresses in the open‑source world. But he insisted "AI is a great tool, but it's a tool" rather than a wholesale replacement for programmers.

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Torvalds spoke with Verizon's Open Source Program Office head, Dirk Hohndel, who is also a Linux kernel maintainer -- and Torvalds' friend. Torvalds added that while the Linux kernel's long‑standing release process has been stable "for pretty much exactly 20 years" since the move to Git, that trend broke about six months ago as AI coding tools took off.

"In the last six months, we've seen a lot more commits," Torvalds noted, estimating that "the last two releases, it's been about 20% more commits than we had in the previous releases over many years."

Initially, Torvalds misread the spike as excitement around a major version change: "At first I thought, 'hey, people are excited about the 7.0 release because I changed the major number every once in a while…' and it turns out I was wrong. The real change that happened in the last six months was that the AI tools actually got good enough for a lot of people... we're seeing a definite uptick in just development on pretty much all fronts."

Torvalds acknowledged that the new tools lower the barrier of entry for contributors, echoing Hohndel's observation that "the tooling actually lowers this initial barrier… [and] does a big chunk of the work." But he emphasized that the real impact is social rather than purely technical: "The big pain points in Linux, traditionally, and I suspect in most projects, have not been so much the code itself, but… when you are forced to change how you work."