"I cannot be Linus and an LLM cannot be my subsystem maintainer"

A short note, labelled as such by the author, rebutting Antirez's framing of the expert developer as Linus with agents as his subsystem maintainers. Maganti's objection is trust, and specifically which decisions trust has to cover: "just passing tests or static verification is not enough for me. The decisions I most often dislike are precisely the ones that cannot be easily checked. Tests cannot tell me that an agent chose the wrong abstraction or produced an API that is unpleasant to use." He is not arguing against agents; he calls them "an extremely capable bounded implementer" and uses them extensively every day. His conclusion is narrow: "At best, today's AI is helping me implement my decisions; it is not freeing me to be Linus." Argued judgment, no data, and no discussion of it surfaced anywhere, so its reach is unobserved rather than zero.

Why it matters: Robert C. Martin argues for not reading the code and surrounding the agent with extreme constraints instead. That position assumes a dense enough verification harness substitutes for review. This is the first artifact here attacking that assumption at the root rather than complaining about output quality, from someone shipping with agents daily.