I’ve always thought that software engineers are naturally curious people who can’t wait to try out the latest technology. I recently realized that that’s not necessarily true.
I recently asked a developer friend if he had tried Claude Code and Codex, even if only for a few minutes over the weekend.
“No,” she said proudly. This is a highly educated and experienced software engineer working on large, long-term projects.
It turns out that some technologists are just as resistant to change as everyone else.
It’s not just her. This is happening in one of the most important software projects on the planet.
Linux is the operating system that powers much of the Internet, from cloud computing to smartphones to countless business systems.
It’s also a huge open source project built by thousands of volunteers. Some of these developers want to limit the use of AI to write and review code.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, recently shut it down for good. He argued that AI is just another tool that is very good at writing and checking code and finding bugs in software.
If you don’t want to use AI, Torvalds joked, you can just fork it yourself. (I’m here for the open source dad joke. A fork is when someone copies existing software and starts independently developing their own version of it.)
“this is do not have There has never been, and never will be, some kind of “social warrior” project,” Torvalds wrote on the Linux mailing list. “We make decisions primarily based on technical merit. We are not afraid of new tools.”
A year ago, it was unclear whether AI would be that useful, but that doesn’t matter now, he said.
Torvalds acknowledged that using AI can be “painful” in part because it keeps finding bugs in software code written by humans, which can be embarrassing for software engineers.
“But the solution is not to stick your head in the sand and sing ‘la-la’.”
Some people seem to say out loud, “La, I can’t hear you.”
to do,” he wrote.
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