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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.
Just use ai to write out your longer response /s
That would improve length, comprehension, desirability, gramification, and … hold on, still buffering out the Vibe List of random categories I posthoc figured help justify my point. AI taught me that’s a good way to make points.
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.
Both extremes are absolutely maddening here. I’m getting as sick of the anti-AI crowd as I am the vibe-code-tech-bros. At this point you could just put them all in a sack and start hitting them with sticks and wouldn’t care who got the worst of it.
There’s a definite middle-ground here. Linus is one of the ultimate pragmatists and it shows here. It was helpful - so he used it. It helped you so you used it. I’ve found it to be incredibly helpful so I use it.
Not all usages are equal just as all hand-written code is not equal. There are good ways to use these tools and bad ways. But the tools themselves are still just tools.
the anti AI slop is damaging. when politicians want AI to control nukes they are going to point to the chuds using a hammer on a screw as proof it’s all curated engagement hysteria. legitimate concerns will be treated like UFO sightings. it’s like false rape accusations. the more you cry wolf the less inclined people are to believe you when a real fear is expressed.
Yeah, it’s like a calculator. Don’t get reliant on it. Know why it gives an answer, be able to get to the answer yourself, but appreciate the time saving of the calculator when you can verify that it was correct much faster than getting to the answer yourself.
The art of using a digital calculator is being able to put in a problem that would take you a couple of minutes to solve, get the calculator’s answer in a couple of seconds, AND be able to spot-check the reasonable-ness of the answer in a couple of seconds more. Blind trust is ridiculously risky, cutting your speed by half to move from 99% correct to 99.99% correct is well worth the extra time and effort invested.
- 1️⃣ Start screen recording yourself 🎦
- 🦟 Fix the bug and write up the PR, except…
- Throw in a lot of gratuitous emojis 🎉🏆🤝 – em-dashes – and “On the other hands”
- 📤 Submit it
- When they come 😡 screaming at you about no-AI, just show them the video 😎
- All their outrage will be spent on accusing you of using 🤖AI.
- Where it all started will be forgotten 🥳
- Profit 🏆
Comment written by 💯 human
Honestly 15+ year old bugs are also left in the linux kernel for people to pick up, Learn from and get deeper in kernel development. They know they can easily find them with a LLM but choose not to. Policy’s are changing due to the mass influx of these “bug” fixes.
There’s academic exercises for education. The production kernel used by billions around the world is no place to intentionally leave bugs, and it doesn’t matter how they’re detected. What matters is if they are corrected without creating regressions.
Not really… “Education” and real world are vastly different. Getting accustomed to a mailing list other maintainers etc is not something you learn with your education.
And leaving bugs for hardware no one has touched in ages is not too big of a deal. And a nice gateway for new comers who actually want to learn it instead of trow a LLM at it.
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.
The exact quote is:
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
That’s a long way short of finding the bug and pointing it out, and instead is just the tedious work of adding checks and then deciding where to add more checks when you have the result of the previous checks. I suspect if we’d spent a trillion dollars on a tool for that, we could have come up with something much more efficient than an LLM.
I have found that LLM agents can monitor ALL the logs, synthesize information that takes me hours to put together in minutes - and when there’s a problem in there it can spot it faster and more often than me. It can also miss things, not as many as I miss given equal time to work the problem, but it’s not perfect - just better. Like cutting down a tree with a chainsaw, instead of a bare hacksaw blade.
“who may not be quite as stubborn as I am” that is the most Linus torvalds thing to say. good to see his passive agressive nature being put in a press release.
Press release? This is a github commit.
You must be an ex reddit user as you neither clicked the link, nor looked at the domain it linked to.
You will be surprised to know, “ex-reddit user” is the majority of Lemmy users.
But most of us have the decency to be ashamed about it.
why? reddit actually had content and debate
It’s not that serious
Just a nitpick, git commit. Kernel development has nothing to do with GitHub other than the fact that there is a mirror of the repo in there.
Hahaha
cool
