I think there are a couple of things here.

I think he’s coping honestly, I’m not sure if he truly believes it’s democratizing anything, he has spoken against AI as well, so it’s weird seeing this contradiction. He has also been very against programming without thinking deeply about the code for so long, again a contradiction. He seems to be coping with all of the work being wasted. All of those years he and others have worked to produce good code, just gone.

The other thing I feel is going on right now is, how corporations kind of took over Linux. At some point they were improving the project, but now they definitely aren’t and he can’t do anything about that. There are many contributions accepted now, despite not being very well done, just because they need to keep going and there’s so much to go through, but there aren’t enough maintainers and probably never will be because of how everything in Linux is organized.

Which brings me to my last point, maintainers. I think he’s hoping that LLMs will be a great tool to help or even replace maintainers, because they can’t deal with the work otherwise.

I think with this whole mess, he’s just trying to keep it together and be pragmatic about it as he’s always done, but this time he’s just losing.