Linus Torvalds no longer sees himself as a programmer. At the Open Source Summit India 2026, the Linux creator explained that his role has shifted fundamentally—he now functions as a development leader rather than a hands-on coder. His work centers on understanding the intent behind community contributions rather than writing code directly.
His toolkit reflects this evolution: Git, email, and occasional Google searches. It's a stripped-down approach focused on incremental stability over flashy feature releases.
Torvalds is skeptical about AI's role in kernel development. While large language models can help surface old bugs, they generate noise—hallucinated error reports and shallow patches that burden human maintainers. These AI-generated fixes often amount to band-aids that miss underlying logic errors. On Rust in the kernel, Torvalds remains pragmatic: interesting, but C remains simpler and more effective for the job.
The Linux project is also tightening its scope by dropping support for obsolete hardware—like x86 machines without hardware floating-point support—to reduce unnecessary maintenance burden.
