- 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
and in the process he introduced a race condition, a performance regression costing up to 9% when making reads of files around 1 MiB and dumped the responsibility of fixing his mess on co-maintainers and went on vacation.
Yeah but it sounds like three steps forward half a step back. Also, reviews/testing caught it. Sounds like the system is working. I’ve written quite a few race condition bugs in my 25 year career. That nobody caught until weeks in prod.
I understand the reluctance of AI but there’s no denying that AI in capable hands can be useful.
Have you considered that you might be an ai, yourself? I hear only AI makes these mistakes.
In capable hands. Is the real issue. Too many people believe they are capable hands.
That’s not a new issue.
The absolute slop I’ve seen people hand write long before AI is actually impressive.
AI is just a force multiplier
I mean, fine. But its easier to fix human written slop over AI slop solely because of the sheer volume of AI slop.
Eh it depends, you can use AI to help you fix AI slop.
A hand written project I worked on was such a mess I can’t even begin to describe how badly written it was.
It was a POC writen by students that then just got launched as the actual product for millions of users.
The DB had zero foreign keys.
The thing just had to be rewritten from scratch
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.
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
Isnt that because of a bug in f2fs, and not his kernel patch?
How does this compare to his usual patches?
This is the first time a bug has been introduced into Linux, the AI apocalypse is truly upon us.
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