What Linus is saying that LLM review is finding decades old esoteric bugs in the kernel code, like dirtyfrag. And the amount of bugfixes and mitigations are pushing the update sizes up. This is making the kernel more secure and stable in the long run. It will be just a rocky couple of years.

they are NOT vibe coding the kernel.

Ironically those are all bug fixes.

“But it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due to review by various AI tools.”

You will just have to stay on the lts/stable release

AI is finding bugs, which are getting fixed. That's great, it means a more secure and stable system. As these vulnerabilities are patched out, they are gone forever(regressions not withstanding).

Theoretically, Linux could become perfectly secure. It's not going to stop people from doing insecure things, but it could mean there are no unintended security weaknesses. We could hit a point were an "LTS" copy of Linux never receives a single security patch, because as long as the code isn't changing, there's nothing to fix.

Of course, this is all theoretical, and assumes that new classes of attacks or bigger chains for attacks are never found, but vulnerabilities should be a finite resource in a static codebase, and once that resource is fully exhausted, the code is now fully safe.

Ideally, open weights or open source models catch up, and this can all be done without paying a ransom to OpenAI or Anthropic, and is available through the whole stack, not just kernel level.

You should read the article. Linus simply said that LLMs have been useful for finding more bugs, which has led to larger patches (because each patch contains more fixes). They aren’t vibe coding the kernel.