I don't have the time to write out the full response to this I want to right now, so I just want to say there is an almost immeasurable gulf between someone like Linus Torvalds using AI for debugging vs a coked out techbro junior engineer vibecoding the next Spotify but for access to water.
In my heart of hearts I still wish he wouldn't touch the stuff just for the message this is going to send to all the wrong kinds of people but here we are.
If an AI can find the bug and point it out, I don't see a problem, as long as it is checked thoroughly enough by an actual skilled programmer, to make sure that doing what the AI suggest is not making things worse.
He use AI to put print statements, summarize output and describe code based on prints to narrow place of bug. This is exactly what AI is good at. Funny fact is that you don't need data center scale model for it. You can do it with local model.
Ha! I recently went through a similar process, trying to get some hardware working for a different project that would close some 15+ year old bugs. AI helped me find it, getting sidetracked by several other small bugs in the same few files along the way.
I then wrote the actual fixes myself as a series of very small PRs. They’re all just a handful of lines each, enabling certain hardware flags, properly bounds checking loops, getting a timer initialization corrected, etc. They are all the sort of thing that once you see where they are, the fix is extremely obvious.
In the meantime, the project has adopted a very strict no AI assistance at all policy after some internal debate that almost tore the project apart.
So now I’m sitting on almost a dozen fixes for longstanding problems and have no idea if I should lie and say yes, I found these entirely by myself, or tell the truth, probably get kicked out of the project, and see how much of a shit storm they cause.
But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed.
Well, no shit, all they can do is follow instructions. We just really can't help avoid anthropomorphizing something that speaks language and think it was a good boy for stopping whining and trying again
Honestly I am so tired of intels shit. I have been buying and plugging their GPUs but goddamn their shit is annoying to deal with sometimes. I’m glad Linus is chipping in to improve it. We need another big player.
The code it committed has comments with "old code did this", "old code did that", like AI likes to insert. That is not useful info. It's what version control is for... You can explain why you do a thing, like the AI does at the start, the actual code edited. The assertion it edited is just clutered with irrelevant info now. Is including history like this the usual style for the kernel, seeing that Linus himself signed off on it?
cool
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