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.
More from coding & agent
- AI Agent B2B Payment Verification Tool Charges $0.01 for Risk Assessment — brunerjo · 2026-08-23
- MCP vs CLI vs API: How Tool Design Drives Your AI Token Bill — sanjaykalra · 2026-08-23
- Optimized SENPAI Prompts, Qwen 3.8 27B Agent Uses Sub-agents More Frequently — morgymcg · 2026-08-23
- Building Great Evals: Avoid Single Scores and Embrace Hill Climbing — realmadhuguru · 2026-08-23
- Stop Extracting Everything: Good Codebases Minimize Jumps — serrjoa · 2026-08-23
- Google's Antigravity IDE Gains Traction, Developers Call Gemini 3.7 Flash a Game Changer — jocarrasqueira · 2026-08-23