Well, the tool apparently fought him and “several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.”

And it also doesn’t look like the LLM actually added code so much as helped with debug code and analysis, however exactly that may have looked like. The resulting fix changes three lines of code, very much human-writable or -verifiable.

Also, let’s not worship Linus. The guy has done much good and is brilliant, but he’s still human, still capable of making mistakes. This instance working out well deserves the proper appreciation, bu we still ought to be wary.

I especially like his most recent use of LLMs.

Specifically as a threat to induce someone else to step up as a maintainer of the debug tool sparse.

Great stuff, especially this part:

But Bart, maybe you’d like a new hobby? Think of all the glory. People stopping you in the streets, asking you whether you’re the sparse maintainer and asking for selfies.

You won’t be a rock star or an astronaut (or a fireman, or a dinosaur, or whatever you dreamt of being when you were a wee tyke), but it’s the closest us geeks will ever get.

I’ve been in that position for something nowhere near as important as the Linux Kernel. It SUCKS. I don’t want an AI to take over, but I don’t blame him for wanting to step down.

This is a tool whose previous maintainers have apparently stopped working on it, not something that Linus was still involved in maintaining. This isn’t so much him wanting to step down, as him not wanting to step up if someone else with an interest in it might be willing to do so.

Same diff. I’ve also turned down the “do you want to maintain this” call. Still don’t blame him.

He’s not writing much of anything at all anymore, he is copy pasting emails to git am.