Linus Torvalds took part in the discussion about cancel the “Assisted-by” tag, which is intended to mark changes prepared using AI assistants. Participants at the Maintainers Summit agreed to remove the requirement to use this tag from the patch design rules, but when discussing a patch that made a change to the documentation, developer Laurent Pinchart spoke out against the removal.
Laurent argued his position by saying that even if it is impossible to force people to always comply with the AI declaration rule, since some developers will still cheat, the community should still formally set its expectations and clearly indicate that what is acceptable and what is not. Such an attempt to regulate the development process through restrictions on tools and an appeal to “setting expectations” caused a violent response Torvalds.
According to Linus, this has nothing to do with “expectations”, but is caused by personal quirks. Linus does not recognize the concept of “don’t use AI for such and such tasks”, which is akin to recommending not to use compilers when preparing code, in the context that if a developer does not understand how a computer processes machine code, then the proposed change is not worth considering, and the developer is not competent if he cannot write code in assembly language. To take the situation to the point of absurdity, you can also demand that text editors not be used when writing explanations for commits, in order to allow only developers who are able to correctly type text in one go without tools that allow them to correct errors made when entering.
Linus is against introducing any bans on the use of tools to simplify work and expects people to make every effort and understand what they are doing. But this understanding has little to do with what tools they use. In Linus’s experience, people he respects and considers smart are not likely to shy away from new and interesting tools.