Linus Torvalds uses AI for Linux kernel code, warns against low-quality patches

Linus Torvalds, the man who built the Linux kernel and has spent decades rejecting sloppy code in public, is now using an AI coding assistant to help write some of his own. He isn’t handing over the keys, though. Torvalds says AI is fine in the hands of competent developers. He has far less patience for what he calls “drive-by” patches from people who don’t understand the code they submit. What Torvalds actually built with Claude On October 10, 2026, Torvalds posted an experimental series of eight patches to a Git branch named ‘noref-filemap-read-with-llm’. The work was done with help from Anthropic’s Claude Code, a large language model tool built for programming. The patches target a long-running problem in the kernel’s memory management: page-cache contention. When many threads read the same cached file, they all update shared reference counters, and that bookkeeping slows everything down. Torvalds’ patches let those threads read the cached file without touching the shared counters. The numbers from his own laptop test are hard to ignore. Throughput climbed from approximately 10 million reads per second to 30 to 33 million. Kernel cycles per read fell from approximately 2,950 to ...