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418

Linus Torvalds used AI to fix a Linux bug, and now LLM critics on Linux face an uncomfortable choice (www.xda-developers.com)

submitted 2 days ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world

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https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2026/08/msg00041.html

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[+] Draegur@lemmy.zip -7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I think there's a big difference between
A. Expecting people to pay you and give you credit for something AI made for you
vs
B. Playing with AI and if it spits out something you like a lot you keep it to yourself unless someone else specifically asks you to show it to them.

It's basically masturbation.

People are gonna do it to themselves and enjoy it but if you try to show me that shit without my consent we are not going to be friends.

[–] BlindPenguin@lemmy.world 15 points 20 hours ago

We're not talking about the average clueless vibe coder here. Programming involves a lot more than just writing code. What Torvalds did was essentially "AI assisted coding". As i understand it, he used it to narrow down the position of the bug in the code and then fixed it himself with a one-liner because apparently AI couldn't find a solution on its own:

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

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/818bebeb63dd6bf5f4e07e145f6cdbace520a34c>

That's basically how AI should be used. To speed up things that are technically easy to do, but still very time consuming.