Quoting Linus Torvalds
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
Linus Torvalds said an AI helped him through a brutal bug hunt, but kept calling it impossible. It was useful anyway — after he pushed it, it kept digging and even wrote the commit message.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Linus Torvalds has a new anecdote for the AI coding debate, and it is not a glowing one. He described a “debug session from hell” where an AI did a lot of the grunt work, but also repeatedly insisted the problem was impossible and unsolvable and that the right move was to write a report and move on.
That’s a pretty specific kind of disappointment. The machine was not useless; Torvalds says it kept adding debug code and then analyzing the results faithfully when he pushed it. It just didn’t have much stamina for the parts of debugging that are mostly stubbornness.
And that, really, is the point of the quote. The AI was willing to quit several times. Torvalds was not. So the human kept the investigation alive, and in the end he let the AI write the commit message for the fix, which landed under the title “drm/xe: Don’t hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM”.
It’s a neat little snapshot of where these tools are right now: useful, fast, occasionally dramatic, and still liable to throw up its hands when the problem gets ugly. The assistant can chew through repetitive work. It still can’t replace the part where someone decides the bug is worth beating into submission.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the most believable AI programming story around: the tool is great until the work stops being polite. People keep selling these systems as if they’re junior engineers with perfect confidence, when they’re really more like eager interns who occasionally declare the office on fire. The stubborn human remains the premium feature.
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