- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/linux@programming.dev/p/2509642/linus-torvalds-posts-his-first-ai-assisted-patch-to-the-linux-kernel-synthetic-test-clo
cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/linux@programming.dev/p/2509642/linus-torvalds-posts-his-first-ai-assisted-patch-to-the-linux-kernel-synthetic-test-clo
if Linus, who has worked with the language AND the project for decades, can’t find a race condition and a performance regression in his VERY FIRST LLM-assisted commit, then just maybe we should accept that humans are fucking horrible att catching the mistakes that clankers make and stop deluding us into thinking that this is the future of software engineering.
What makes you think he wouldn’t have made the same mistake hand coding it?
If he didn’t catch it on his own review the likelihood that he would’ve made the same mistake if he coded it himself is high.
First of all, if a human makes a mistake it’s a learning opportunity. When a human misses a bug an LLM hallucinated, noone really learn from it.
I like to compare it with the xray machines at airports. Human operators stare at the screens hunting for weapons and other prohibited items and miss pretty obvious stuff because they get bored out of their minds. They actually added a mechanism to insert fake xray images of weapons ever so often to actually keep the operators interested and alert. Ain’t much too different from doing code reviews being the human-in-the-loop/scapegoat.
Also, LLMs don’t necessarily generate good code. They excel at generating good-looking mediocre code.
So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and claim that Linus is more likely to miss a bug a LLM wrote on his behalf than one he wrote himself.
As per Linux kernel AI policy (and a common fucking sense), you’re the one responsible for the code that is submitted from your side, regardless of the tools and pipeline you use. Now get this, when an agent makes a mistake, that you didn’t notice, that’s still a learning opportunity, especially when you’re held accountable for the fuck up.
True… When you give them a general task that involves solution of technical problems and decision making. But when it’s a concrete “do the x thing over here, using this, this, and this”, which is then accompanied by your manual review of the changes, they actually do fine, basically allowing you to minimize the tedium, while not robbing you of the most interesting and important parts of development.
Did Linus’s pipeline look like what i described, tho, when he introduced the aforementioned bugs? Was it his technical decision that, by proxy, introduced bugs? I don’t know. Regardless of the answers, he’s a grown-ass man, and thus is responsible for the consequences of his decisions.
Is he more likely to introduce a bug now that he uses AI? Only time will show. I might be wrong, but i think Linus is too smart for it to be the case.
Agents can “learn” from their mistakes within their harness.
You or the agent can add notes in the memory files or the repo level agents.md files, or standards and conventions files to look for those mistakes.
Most harnesses these days will spin up a new agent to do a review once the implementation is done, that agent will take memory files, agents.md files and other standards and conventions files into its context to know what to look out for so it won’t make the same mistake twice
Claude code is even doing “dreaming” where it’ll do a cron every night to look through all the conversations from the day for stuff it messed up on and add to its memory files to not do those same mistakes.
The TSA has to pretend to even keep their employees looking busy. Hilarious.
Wild how mad you are about this.
Not really
Ok. Looks like the process just needs to do more testing/validation in CI.
What’s your alternative? just stop progress here? No more new things?
How about we keep relying on deterministic tooling that are not built on stolen data and don’t fuck the economy and the environment at the same time? How about putting a fraction of the money invested i LLMs into SAST and DAST tools? Maybe a dollar or two for fuzz testers? How about we look at projects like curl and build safeguards into the project to avoid footguns?
I’m not opposed, that honestly sounds good. Now, let’s wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first.
People will do what they do.
I run small local models, I do a lot of what you are saying. However this technology and process is new. Yeah capitalism will fuck everything up but you can’t control people.
Capitalism is a control mechanism for people
So let’s make a competing one and swap it out for something else. Oh and by tomorrow, I’ll wait.
Just because there are better options doesn’t mean you can change it over night and without set backs.
I never said all that, was just pointing out that people are already effectively controlled. Just a little bonus aside, carry on
Understood. My bad just get a lot of comments saying we need to change things. I agree with a lot of what people say on here.
No worries homie