The agent helps a lot to fix bugs. Just point the agents at the bug reports. They do the reproduction, debugging and fixes. We "just" have to review. (Sometimes ask more details and tell we'd prefer another approach.) This makes bug fixing much faster and automated.
And at the same time, it seems we get less bug reports to our library. I think user just use their agents to code, and agents don't report bugs, they just work it around somehow.
So overall, the open bug count is decreasing. Which somehow feels good.
On the other hand, we get a lot of PR made by other's people agents, which can be a bit overwhelming when it's just a huge code drop. We can't easily review that.
From the last paragraph:
"The Linux kernel is aimed at production use, not research or experimentation. But there is currently a massive experiment being run on the kernel's development processes and community."
"This community has absorbed new processes and tools many times over its 35-year history, and will almost certainly find a way to do that this time as well. But that absorption has not always been without turbulence along the way."
Which covers how he responds and pushes back on much of this, as well as asking for a patch (not just bug reports)
Historical numbers are not valid because incentivizes of a well funded entity have changed. It would require an equally well funded push to up the patch numbers without LLMs to really measure the impact in a quantifiable way.
atlantic 0000:0f:00.0: PM: failed to resume async: error -12
AI fix this, thanks
(Edit: title has been fixed)
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It honestly doesn't want to make me open anything for outside contributions anymore.
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whTs09_ozN+e09GU68N1wPP56...
He used Claude Code to write one of his patches in [1] and introduced a data race bug in the kernel unbeknownst to himself but this bug was caught by other reviewer [1] before it made it into a new kernel release.
So I'm afraid Linus himself did not understand the changes Claude made to the code he submitted in the mailing list, despite his "principles" in telling others previously that AI was creating slop patches and then now shouting at others who were concerned about using LLMs on code where they do not understand the generated code themselves when it all applied to....himself.
> The kind of expectations I have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing.
> But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use.
> And quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.
He’s saying that understanding or competence are more about the person than their AI use. I think that’s a reasonable argument, even though I disagree on the basis that it’s at least a little correlated in the shortcuts in understanding the many devs I’ve seen (not all, but a nontrivial amount) seem to be taking.
> Here's a new rule just for you: don't use compilers for any of your kernel submissions.
> Because if you can't show that you really understand what the machine is actually doing by writing your code in assembler, then I don't want to see your code contribution. You clearly aren't competent if you can't write it that way.
Why? He seems very pragmatic. I fully expected him to embrace it, with the only concern being correctness and quality.