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Linus Torvalds used AI to fix a Linux bug, and now LLM critics on Linux face an uncomfortable choice (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2026/08/msg00041.html

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[–] 166 points 5 days ago* (7 children)

In his commit message:

[And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus "round_up()" to a "round_down()", but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus ]

Didn't he state quite early on that LLMs were a good tool to spot bugs? Found this from 3 years ago: https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/

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  • [–] 104 points 5 days ago* (4 children)

    Hackers use LLMs to spot odd exploits so it makes sense developers use them too. The usage of LLMs in development likely won‘t make Linux better or safer overall, because bugs and exploits wouldn‘t have been found by either side without it in the first place. It‘s like pandora‘s box where Linus is kind of forced to use it. If that makes sense.

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  • [–] 19 points 5 days ago

    He might consider himself forced to use it to find bugs. He wouldn't be forced to use it to write the fix.

    (Now you might say he wasn't or isn't, but even if that were true for the kernel at large this doesn't seem to be: https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/08/10/linus-torvalds-says-ai-has-made-huge-linux-kernel-updates-the-new-normal/5285268 And this seems like mostly to be on Linus, for not stepping in here.)

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  • [–] 5 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Following the hacker arm race is a good point. But also the number of bugs is not a bottomless pit. If an LLM allows to find more, and hopefully the test and reviews are good enough to limit the new opportunities to introduce some from LLMs, it should reduce the overall number of bugs and make the software generally safer.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 days ago

    The frequency of bugs and exploits has increased exponentially since AI came about and I don't think it's due to hacker sophistication at all. Most of the advanced tools to find exploits aren't available to the general public if they really exist at all.

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  • [–] 22 points 5 days ago (5 children)

    Whatever's the outcome, the anthropomorphization in that message stinks 🤮

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  • [–] 48 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Dude, I'm not an AI zealot, but I anthropomorphize my socks.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Yeah but people aren’t having conversations with your socks thinking they actually are alive and your socks don’t then talk said people into suicide so I’m pretty sure it’s at least a little bit different.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    I saw a post about mom dog jumping into a flood to rescue pups. They said they would end up finding new homes for pups. I amphropromorphized (can't spell) the mom misising her pups, only to read that it's common for them to get annoyed by older pups and even eat unwell pups.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Trying to avoid anthropomorphising something with which you interact via natural language is incredibly laborious, and achieves nothing.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Silly humans, antropomorphizing everything. Say, what species are you?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    Correct. A being of power should never anthromorphise. It is a thing of flesh. I laugh at that because I am human and I never anthromorphise even the slightest part of a marble slab. I must be superior to most humans I guess. The forest people, though, those are legit just uninformed I think. I hate those creaks they make. I mean generate. I mean the wind . I mean no i mean the sound that nobody years because nobody is there and only humans and tree people are alive and the other animals are biological machines that we must try to ignore even if they lick us on the face wagging their tiny tail at us. For they are unworthy. I mean its tail. If it generates tail wags it is only an impression of aliveness and we must stand firm beside our tree people brothers and sisters on this.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Regardless of how he got there, this is a pretty obnoxious and useless commit message...

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  • [–] 15 points 4 days ago

    Seriously. You don't need to outline your whole journey to finding the bug, commentary on the tools you used, and how it all made you feel, just what the problem was and how it was fixed. Put the rest in a blog post.

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  • [+] -7 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    LLMs are a great tool for create bugs *

    Fuck Linus.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Let us know how your Linux 2.0 goes.

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  • [+] -9 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    If you don't have anything better to say than an ad hominem fallacy and a red herring fallacy, then you're totally discrediting yourself.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Yes, because your original comment was so thought out and well reasoned to begin with 🙄

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (2 children)

    Well, it's not that I'm telling another thing than the truth.

    You're attacking something totally unrelated and that I've never mentioned ("Linux 2.0") because you simply can't deny that LLM are bug-making machinegunss.

    Literature on that in my response.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago

    Do you think anybody, especially Linus, is unaware that LLMs produce bugs if left to themselves? He's made it clear that PRs will continue to be judged on their code quality as they have all this while. Your comment is especially ironic considering how the post is about an elusive bug that took 1 line to fix, but hours upon hours and 24 other patches to debug. Anybody with any knowledge of Linus would find the idea hilarious that he'd allow, let alone commit, crappy code into the kernel. The only real issue up for debate is the ethics of it, considering the provenance of most training data, and potentially copyright issues.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 days ago* (1 child)

    Part 1:

    Code Quality (defects, bugs, logic)

    Security & Vulnerabilities

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  • [–] 0 points 3 days ago

    Part 2:

    Productivity Illusion (perception vs reality)

    Churn, Replacement & Survival

    Production Impact & Outages

    Deskilling

    • Brains show less activity when completing tasks with LLMs compared to completing tasks with search or completing tasks without digital help.
    • Developers who use early-2025 LLMs reported higher subjective performance, but were measured to have lower objective performance. This gap between subjective and objective performance was considered notable.
    • In an Anthropic study, learners using LLMs demonstrated lower learning rates on average compared to learners not using LLMs.
    • A recent study uses the term "cognitive surrender" to describe the way humans tend to offload key critical thinking skills onto LLMs, even when the output is wrong.
    • A paper entitled "AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance" from April 2026 by academics from MIT, Oxford, UCLA, and Carnegie Mellon showed alarming evidence that performing a variety of tasks with the help of AI for only 10 minutes causes "inpaired unassisted performance and reduced persistence". The researchers noted that "although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up"; they also pointed out that "these findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning".
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