Linus Torvalds credits AI in 'debug session from hell' — after it repeatedly declared the bug unsolvable
Simon Willison · rss · 2026-08-23
In a Linux kernel drm/xe commit message, Linus Torvalds wrote that a brutal debug session was "enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work". But he also noted the AI flatly stated several times that the problem was impossible and unsolvable, suggesting they just write a report about it — he suspects it was trained by people less stubborn than he is. When pushed, though, the AI kept adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully, so credit where due: he even let the AI write the commit message.
Simon Willison quoted the passage, tagging it ai-assisted-programming — another first-hand account of AI's role in real kernel-level debugging.
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