The Tag They Had to Invent

In July 2026, Linus Torvalds told the Linux kernel mailing list that Linux is not an anti-AI project and that anyone who objected could fork the code or walk away. The trigger was Sashiko, an automated review system whose published numbers claim it finds 53.6 percent of the bugs that later required human fixes — bugs that had already cleared ordinary human review. Torvalds framed the ruling as unremarkable: AI is a tool, judged on technical merit like any other. The press read it as a pragmatist closing a culture war. But the decisive document is not the mailing list post. It was merged seven months earlier, and almost no one outside the kernel read it. On December 23, 2025, Sasha Levin’s Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst landed in the tree, based on consensus from that year’s Maintainers Summit. It sits beside coding-style.rst and submitting-patches.rst — the files that define what it means to contribute to Linux at all. Its strongest language is a prohibition: AI agents…