Linus Torvalds: I'm Not a Programmer Anymore

MUMBAI -- At Open Source Summit India 2026, Linux creator Linus Torvalds and his friend Dirk Hohndel discussed the current state of Linux and where it's headed. The conversation opened with Hohndel asking about what Torvalds thought about the Linux 7.1 release. Torvalds said he doesn't think in terms of blockbuster releases: "For me, the highlight has been that it's been a very steady progression of continued improvements." He stressed that since they created the Git version control system, "We don't do releases that have big new splashy features, and I actually actively try to avoid that kind of model; we want to have this kind of incremental improvement and steady progress all the time." AI is, however, pressuring this workflow.

"It's been getting a bit harder lately because of AI finding interesting bugs, and that has stressed out people in the community," Torvalds added, even as the kernel continues its "steady release schedule" every nine to ten weeks. Torvalds described his work pattern during kernel merge windows: "Over two weeks, I do roughly 200 merges. That's a very rough ballpark number." Even with decades of trust in maintainers, he pushes back on last-minute changes: "If it's not a really important fix, please queue it for the next release instead of sending me last-minute fixes," because "fixes… may not be worth the slight chance that it causes a new problem." The technical load doesn't bother him as much as human issues: "New code is a technical problem… we can fix those… What tends to stress me out is that occasionally we have personality issues, and trust me, code is easy to fix.

Personality is not always as easy to fix." Torvalds admits he's caused some of those problems himself, although he's worked on that. Here's another thing that's changed: Torvalds no longer sees himself as a programmer. "Let's be entirely honest.

I hardly read code at all anymore. I'm not a programmer, I'm a development lead." He still writes small patches, but they're more guidance than authority: "I still write code in the sense that I send people patches… but then I make it very clear that, hey, this is a suggestion. This is untested… I expect the maintainers of the code to be the ones who then send me the fix back.

So I very seldom commit my own code anymore." What matters most to him is understanding intent: "When I do a pull request, I want to understand the bigger picture. It's one of the reasons I ask for pull requests with very good explanations: I will read them. I want to understand what's going on." He said he dives into code mainly when something forces his attention, like build breaks or merge conflicts: "I've done so many conflict resolutions over the years that I could probably do them in my sleep… Quite often at that point, when I look at the code, I sometimes find issues." On the long-troublesome Microsoft NTFS subsystem, Torvalds joked that "NTFS has been kind of a problem child over the years, where finding people to maintain it has sometimes been problematic." He continued, "We have two different groups maintaining two different versions of NTFS, and both of them work, and I'm just letting them fight it out and see which one comes on top, or maybe, maybe both will stay around for a long time." "I'm not very sentimental when it comes to technology," Torvalds added.