Linus Torvalds's first LLM-assisted patch series

tombert

I use AI like most software people do nowadays, but I have to admit that I'm a little surprised that Linus is onboard with it. He always felt like one of the last "old school" developers...he wouldn't even touch C++!

tarkin2

Didn't Linus say he stopped coding a while ago, or at least coding the kernel, and mainly reviews and manages the codebase now? Whether the code comes from a machine or a human, perhaps it matters little to how he's been working for a while. It's interesting that although I guess he reviewed this LLM generated code, the human review found a race condition.

vatsachak

So many people's take away from this story is that Linus used Claude to improve the Kernel therefore anyone can.

mono442

He could have at least written the commit messages himself. That llm yapping is annoying to read.

dorianniemiec

So what would many anti-AI people say, now that critical infrastructure (Linux, OpenSSL, systemd, MariaDB, and so on) is AI-assisted?

relativeadv

When you do it, its slop. When I do it? Its craftsmanship.

manbash

> The code, the test programs, the review behind the list above and the first draft of this text were done with an LLM coding assistant (Claude Code) under my direction. The measurements were run on my machine. (From the empty commit message put at the top of the draft LLM branch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... )

eikenberry

While I'm not surprised by Linus using AI, I am a bit surprised Linus used Claude and not one of the open weights models. I know he's always been much more pragmatic than Richard but using a fully closed, proprietary system that is actively attempting to lock out the (more) open competition seems to go against his general history and preferences for free software.

niemandhier

I looked at the diffs, they are moderately sized and well readable. Nothing like the 2k loc people tend to commit with LLMs. One can work with commits and MRs like that.

lossolo

Links do not work for me in this article. But I found them, so if anyone is interested: https://lkml.iu.edu/2610.1/13146.html https://mirrors.hust.edu.cn/git/linux.git/commit/?id=4c0f369... https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/rcu-free-v3

VCFundedGenYer

This is incredibly disappointing. The things he's saying is damaging his supporter base in an irreparable fashion. Linus' behavior is reprehensible.

piro0919

Code from Claude Code that looks like it works but is actually broken happens to me all the time. I usually find out when I debug it locally, or when Sentry sends me an error alert.