Linus Torvalds used LLMs to decipher obscure kernel code — and surfaced 4 bugs dating to 2013

hey_abusiddik · x · 2026-10-24

Linus Torvalds practiced what he preaches: he used LLM tools not to write code, but to understand and test it in the Linux kernel.

After Nils Ollrogge reported a bug in the assocarray library with a patch, Torvalds found the code "too obscure for me to follow," so he used modern LLM tools to make sense of it.
An LLM-assisted branch (noref-filemap-read-with-llm) split up large, hard-to-read functions to improve readability, and confirmed the originally reported bug.
The LLM also surfaced three additional bugs that had sat in the library since its first commit in 2013 — four in total.
The code was validated through a user-space test harness and landed as the assoc-array-fixes tag.

A notable showcase of LLMs for legacy-code comprehension and testing rather than plain code generation.

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