this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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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 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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[–] 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.