Linus Torvalds: So my opinion has always been that hey, AI is a great tool, but it's a tool. And
when I see people saying, "Hey, 99% of our code is written by AI," I literally get angry, because
those same people, I pretty much guarantee that 100% of their code is written by compilers, but they
never say that, right? It's exactly the same issue.

I grew up writing machine code, and when I say machine code, I don't mean assembly language, I mean
the numbers. And I mean, it leaves an imprint on you. I can still remember LDA is hex A9 on the
6502, right? Correct. And it took me a while to understand that writing down the numbers and
calculating offsets for branches is kind of stupid and people had come up with this tool called an
assembler. And then later on I figured out compilers are good too, and these days I'm figuring out
AI tools are good too. I'm still writing the code, I'm just not doing it the same way I did when I
was basically typing in numbers in data statements.

And I'm personally 100% convinced that AI is changing programming, but it's not changing the
fundamentals. Exactly the same way that you all use compilers to actually generate your code, you
will all use—well, not maybe all of you, but a lot of people will use AI to generate the code that
the compilers use to generate the code that the assemblers then use to generate the machine code.
This is revolutionary in the same sense that we've seen revolutions before, and AI will increase
your productivity by a factor of 10, and I claim that compilers increased your productivity by a
factor of a thousand. So AI is great, but AI is not changing programming. It may be changing other
areas, don't get me wrong, but I'm a programmer so I don't care.So my opinion has always been that
hey, AI is a great tool, but it's a tool. And when I see people

And one of the things, sorry my voice is already fading, one of the things that I think has always
been true: when you look at the code written by developers, good developers write good code, other
developers write code that then breaks. And the same will be true for the people prompting the AI
tool. People who know what they're doing, who understand systems, will be able to prompt tools to
write good code; and people who don't understand the complexity of systems will also prompt systems
and write code, and it will fail.

And I think you do want to understand how it all works in the end. I still... I don't program in
machine code anymore, but I still look at the generated code. So when I use a compiler, even when I
use AI for my pet toy projects, I will use AI to generate code, I will look at that code, I will
actually still look at the assembly language end result because it's what I grew up with, it's kind
of where my comfort zone is. And right now I'm playing with microcontrollers anyway, so you really
want to actually look at the generated code and make sure it's doing what you really want it to do.

So I think even when you use AI for coding, if you do a project that you actually maintain long
term, you need to understand not just your prompts, but you need to understand the end result too,
because that's the only way you can maintain it long term. And it's easy enough—and we see that all
the time—where you basically generate a new project and it's a throwaway project and it's a one-time
and it's over, and AI is great for that, and we call it "vibe coding". But if you want to make
something serious, you're going to have to maintain it for 35 years or something, and at that point,
it's a lot more than just writing the prompts to make somebody else generate the code.

Dirk Hohndel: Well, unfortunately we're out of time. I have a lot more questions. I guess I'll have
to ask them next year...