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Linus Torvalds used AI to fix a Linux bug, and now LLM critics on Linux face an uncomfortable choice
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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It can't reason. It doesn't think. It makes shit up as it was trained to do. It can sort of detect patterns and make a guess about what response would get it the highest score, but it's so error-prone that a human has to verify the output anyway. It's difficult to tell whether the perceived benefits outweigh the costs. There are many different types of LLMs and use cases.
As a person who values life and our environment, I'd rather not participate in the sloppification of our world. As a Linux user, I am wary of vibe coded flaws slipping under the radar and screwing up my system.
Again, we are stuck in a semantics debate. What I call reasoning you don’t, it seems.
But all I know, as someone that has worked in software engineering for 25+ years, is that the output of whatever it does, and whatever you call it, is incredibly useful.
Saying “it just generates text” is a reflexive reaction that attempts to flatten the nuance.
All Columbus did was sail west.
All America did was throw some fuel into a tube and put Neil Armstrong on the top.
All Picasso did was to throw some paint onto a cloth.
All this PhD student did was generate text.
Surely we’ve got to have some more nuance in there. If there’s a difference between 10000 monkeys hacking on a typewriter and a human writing their doctoral thesis, the quality of their act isn’t in whether text was generated but WHAT text was generated.
It is a pattern matcher. It does not reason.
I have a degree in computer science. Irrelevant. Anyone can see that the "AI" is not intelligence.
It's a large language model. It generates text.
And killed indigenous people. Datacenters and shitty chatbots are killing people today, good point.
Scientists did that, not America.
At least he did it himself instead of prompting an image generator.
Correct. And you seem to have learned nothing useful.
LLMs can sometimes be useful. AI does not yet exist. It's a scam.
You don't understand the metaphor. It's about the nature of infinity, not the competency of monkeys as authors.
If you run an AI prompt infinite times, it will inevitably generate a correct answer somewhere in there. The rest of the time, it will be wrong, potentially with lethal consequences.
I have to verify the output of what humans generate, too. I’m constantly looking at the source of claims. The AI is no different and it’s not nearly as wrong as Person is.