"but"? Isn't that exactly what reviewers are for?
The actual news of the article: LLM helped do a significant piece of work that human developers had failed to do for two years.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
373 points (89.8% liked)
Technology
88892 readers
3133 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Or rather, LLMs helped create bad code, and so didn't do a significant peice of work - or did it so poorly it was dangerous to rely on for general use in an Operating system:
Race conditions in programming occur when multiple processes or threads attempt to modify and access shared data simultaneously, leading to unpredictable and unintended outcomes. They can result in data corruption, program failures, and other unexpected behaviors if not properly managed with synchronization techniques.
The work isn't done if it's introducing risky/bad code (especially at the level of an operating system). That's like saying "LLMs cure cancer by cutting patients into quarters, human reviewers stop it"
Then someone claiming "the real story here is that LLMs cured cancer".
Was cancer actually cured? The article doesn't say the problem was fixed by the LLM. It says humans did the work of finalizing parts of it which had to be restricted to an experimental branch, and only operates on 64-bit machines.
The same happens when humans write code. Reviewers hopefully find some of their mistakes, then they fix them
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
That's what code review is for lol.
Where is the story here?
LLMs make slop code faster than humans can meaningfully review. If you make LLMs the only review layer, then slop gets through because they have similar biases. Stop making slop.
Cool assumption. But pretty sure it's not how things work at all but sounds great...
What actually happens is that you have a long list of multiple maintainers reviewing , and multiple branches for testing, and multiple layers of review too.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/process/maintainers.html . See that long list of maintainers for a start.
The actual policy is that everything ends up getting reviewed by a human. If I post a patch, it doesn't go straight to master
If it's not being properly tested and maintained, it gets dropped irrespective of what it is (remember devfs?)
Also, I'm not sure about the kernel specifically, but on projects I submitted code to, they often wanted complex patches broken down if possible.
Yes this means the review process is working. What is important to track is if LLM code causes a disproportionately large number of reviews or reviews that take longer because whoever generated the code doesn't actually know what it is doing. Hopefully not the case here but it does happen a lot with LLM coding.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(32 replies)
I hope he posts on the LKML and gives himself a right public scolding worthy of his failings. Sprinkle some "stupid"s and "idiotic"s in there for good measure.
- "I only care about the final results and the correctness"
- Looks inside
- Final results are shit and code is just slop
Ahhh, I love AI /s
load more comments
(1 replies)
His very first bug. Until this point, he had 100% error-free code. /s
This guy not too long ago chewed out people who vibe-coded an old kernel bug back in.
Look at him now.
Look how far he's falling....
Why? because of a race condition?
We've had race conditions in the kernel since the beginning. And, he didn't vibe code an old kernel bug back in..
Race conditions aren't newsworthy at all honestly, unless they cause a security issue
load more comments
(5 replies)
Torvalds had spent 18 months running a broken version of his own fix for the page-cache reference-counting bottleneck, while other developers had encountered problems with their approaches. The new patches eliminate folio reference-count operations from a common buffered-read path, although Torvalds warned that the benchmark gains would be considerably smaller in real-world workloads.
You know how in star trek or other shows with scripts, how the writers used to just put like or something
load more comments
(2 replies)
how did linus torvalds, the man that would rageface scream at people for doing shit that was perfectly good, that he just didnt like, become the latest to bend over and butter his ass up for the AI cock?
For closed source LLM services controlled by multi-billion dollar corporations even. Dunno if he has always been this cynical or lost sight of any principles he once had.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Middle aged men dementia, induced by money and being surrounded with tech bros and having corporations whisper into your ears...
load more comments
(6 replies)
On Tuesday, he submitted a 10-patch series that delivered a 23-fold throughput improvement in a synthetic benchmark
Impressive, probably kind of like I can answer math questions very very fast.
Reviewers have since identified a race condition and raised concerns about memory reclamation.
That what I thought, I can answer math questions fast, but I don't claim to be able to answer them correctly.
It seems that after the initial AI-generated patches there's been good discussion amongst the kernel devs about sorting out the issues, and a few revisions already that have tidied things up a bit.
So if after all that there ends up being a good performance improvement directly from a revised AI-created patch, what do I do with my pitchfork? Still raised angrily? Half-mast? Do I just let the torch smoulder?
You have to vow to use a new fork (which someone else should totally create) which does not contain this one specific patch.
which someone else should totally create
Congratulations and thank you for volunteering! I look forward to your repo release. You are never allowed to stop maintaining this fork.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
So you're saying the review process worked as designed?
Maybe it did, but apparently the code was not properly reviewed initially, so there could be other hidden problems.
Of course that's the same for human made code, but there's a problem in only judging code from how it performs, and not actually understanding the code. And that seems to be the situation with a lot of AI code.
load more comments
(19 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Linus probably uses AI effectively, but the question is how long until his skill deteriorate because of it.
I'd be more concerned with him and people of that generation aging out maintaining the project first, and newer generations not having the skills to begin with to carry it forward.
This is why my hope is on Redox OS. I wish it would get a bit more resources.
of that generation
Ouch.
I think 'we' have about 20 years left in us. That's long enough for an entire new pet language to be born, surge, wane, and then die. ...or 27 entirely new web frameworks.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
Linus hasn't programmed much for years. He is a manager. I imagine lots of managers are seduced by vibe coding. Programming can be a real slog and takes so much time. Why walk when you can drive?
The problem isn't with Linus losing his skills but sustainability of the entire FOSS space. I don't think many young programmers are ever going to learn the lessons Linus did as a young person and those lessons are still very relevant for low level code working closely with hardware. When the pre-LLM programmers age out I think we are going to be treading water for years with LLM regurgitating variations on the same old human code without much direction or innovation.
It is arguably a different situation for something like webdev which is mostly paint by numbers or enterprise software that is solving the same problems over and over.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is about the extinction of hand coded programming as we know it. You know how very few people know assembly, and every so often a COBOL expert has to be found to update a bank's database so they can overhaul their systems?
What if all of programming becomes like that only worse. With new generations of programmers not actually knowing how to program. A massive decline in numbers and competence... Programmers that only "program" by talking to LLMs.
Ever seen an episode of Star Trek where a computer is in charge of everything, and society crumbles when it breaks down?
I think we might hit a plateau in a generation or two. The point at which we can generate more and more LLMs but don't know how to make them any better. Let alone reprogram unrelated systems like medical scanners, or air traffic safety systems, or mapping systems.
"It's okay we'll have the LLMs improve the LLMs"... For the rest of eternity.
Amanda Caswell
Amanda Caswell is an AI journalist, certified prompt engineer, and technology commentator whose work and expertise have been featured on Fox News and CBS News.
certified prompt engineer 🤣
She gipity..... If not she mine as well be. We are yammering over a techno fart.
Amanda Caswell is an AI journalisturd, certified prompturd engineer, and turdnology commentaturder whose slop and nonsense has been featured on Fox News and CBS News.
certified prompt engineer 🙄
load more comments
(1 replies)
I have always had mixed feelings about AI.
On one hand it is a good tool for offloading monotonous time consuming tasks that you already know how to do.
On the other, its a bad tool for outsourcing for tasks you dont know how to do.
It can be good for simple things, like i got claude code to build me a project planner and to-do list because i cant code but wanted something bespoke for me to help with my adhd. Its great for me but other people might hate it.
But if it is used in place of people figuring out complex problems in their field of expertise then it will inevitably lead to people lacking the skills to make anything and when the bubble bursts there wont be anyone left who knows how to make anything for themselves.
I am opposed to it being used so much at work, i hate getting AI responses from real people. But i am finding it increasingly difficult to find solutions to problems on forums and reddit because everything is just AI answers now :(
I also think linus using it to help him with problems he is struggling to solve is up to him. It might not be the method i would choose, but i didnt write an entire operating system.
Sooooo... are we gonna go oyr own kernel or something now? Seriously i cant believe this world. 35 years of work by tens of thousands of people and this is what we get?
load more comments
(1 replies)
Well hopefully he learned something from this.
He learned to do it more... This solved a problem that several Linux engineers and Linus himself have been struggling to solve for over 2 years, and the race condition was discovered in code review and fixed by a suggestion from Linus...
So without AI, we'd still have no solution to this problem that's been unsolved for over 2 years, with AI we have a solution that went through code review which identified a small bug that was then fixed. He still landed a solution to the problem that wouldn't have landed otherwise...
load more comments
(1 replies)
And here we go!
Who’s paying for the Claude code credits I wonder
check out the Linux Foundation members page, they (nvidia et al) literally pay Torvalds salary
Typical,🤣. They have found another circular route to fund AI 😂
view more: next ›