this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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425
Linus Torvalds used AI to fix a Linux bug, and now LLM critics on Linux face an uncomfortable choice (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 3 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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[–] oce@jlai.lu 166 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (31 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/

[–] Feyd@programming.dev 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 15 points 3 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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