"but"? Isn't that exactly what reviewers are for?
The actual news of the article: LLM helped do a significant piece of work that human developers had failed to do for two years.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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Or rather, LLMs helped create bad code, and so didn't do a significant peice of work - or did it so poorly it was dangerous to rely on for general use in an Operating system:
Race conditions in programming occur when multiple processes or threads attempt to modify and access shared data simultaneously, leading to unpredictable and unintended outcomes. They can result in data corruption, program failures, and other unexpected behaviors if not properly managed with synchronization techniques.
The work isn't done if it's introducing risky/bad code (especially at the level of an operating system). That's like saying "LLMs cure cancer by cutting patients into quarters, human reviewers stop it"
Then someone claiming "the real story here is that LLMs cured cancer".
Was cancer actually cured? The article doesn't say the problem was fixed by the LLM. It says humans did the work of finalizing parts of it which had to be restricted to an experimental branch, and only operates on 64-bit machines.
The same happens when humans write code. Reviewers hopefully find some of their mistakes, then they fix them
Tell me then, was the problem solved, the work done by the LLM?
Was it considered good enough for a mainbranch?
Or was it faulty/risky and require highly trained experts to catch? Then flagged, and only put into an experimental branch?
How many ex-Oracle memory experts do you think are available for this work, in which even Linus didn't catch the race condition?
"Hey guys, nothing to see here if we have enough high level engineers fixing everything".
Tell me then, was the problem solved, the work done by the LLM?
partially
Was it considered good enough for a mainbranch?
Probably, if it took multiple experts to catch the bug.
Or was it faulty/risky and require highly trained experts to catch? Then flagged, and only put into an experimental branch?
As happens with human code all the time
How many ex-Oracle memory experts do you think are available for this work, in which even Linus didn't catch the race condition?
No idea, at least one.
A competent person like Linus can manage and direct competent code generation, whether that code is generated by an AI or an intern.
Right the guy who failed to catchy the problem in the generated code, will be fine.
Wouldn’t it be more like the LLM presented a plan which involved cutting people into quarters then a human rubber stamped it and the people were cut into quarters?
This is about the extinction of hand coded programming as we know it. You know how very few people know assembly, and every so often a COBOL expert has to be found to update a bank's database so they can overhaul their systems?
What if all of programming becomes like that only worse. With new generations of programmers not actually knowing how to program. A massive decline in numbers and competence... Programmers that only "program" by talking to LLMs.
Ever seen an episode of Star Trek where a computer is in charge of everything, and society crumbles when it breaks down?
I think we might hit a plateau in a generation or two. The point at which we can generate more and more LLMs but don't know how to make them any better. Let alone reprogram unrelated systems like medical scanners, or air traffic safety systems, or mapping systems.
"It's okay we'll have the LLMs improve the LLMs"... For the rest of eternity.
I hope he posts on the LKML and gives himself a right public scolding worthy of his failings. Sprinkle some "stupid"s and "idiotic"s in there for good measure.
Who’s paying for the Claude code credits I wonder
check out the Linux Foundation members page, they (nvidia et al) literally pay Torvalds salary
Typical,🤣. They have found another circular route to fund AI 😂
Sooooo... are we gonna go oyr own kernel or something now? Seriously i cant believe this world. 35 years of work by tens of thousands of people and this is what we get?
What process is there which successfully prevents AI code submissions? I wonder if we’re even having the right discussion here. It’s a very hard thing to police when people are doing work for free.
I have always had mixed feelings about AI.
On one hand it is a good tool for offloading monotonous time consuming tasks that you already know how to do.
On the other, its a bad tool for outsourcing for tasks you dont know how to do.
It can be good for simple things, like i got claude code to build me a project planner and to-do list because i cant code but wanted something bespoke for me to help with my adhd. Its great for me but other people might hate it.
But if it is used in place of people figuring out complex problems in their field of expertise then it will inevitably lead to people lacking the skills to make anything and when the bubble bursts there wont be anyone left who knows how to make anything for themselves.
I am opposed to it being used so much at work, i hate getting AI responses from real people. But i am finding it increasingly difficult to find solutions to problems on forums and reddit because everything is just AI answers now :(
I also think linus using it to help him with problems he is struggling to solve is up to him. It might not be the method i would choose, but i didnt write an entire operating system.
Torvalds had spent 18 months running a broken version of his own fix for the page-cache reference-counting bottleneck, while other developers had encountered problems with their approaches. The new patches eliminate folio reference-count operations from a common buffered-read path, although Torvalds warned that the benchmark gains would be considerably smaller in real-world workloads.
You know how in star trek or other shows with scripts, how the writers used to just put like or something
They need to add an analogy in there...
"The problem is with the folio reference-count operations from a common buffered-read path"
"Of course! It's just like putting too much air in a balloon!"
Yeah so then I swapped the flux combobulator with the drago-fleefloo-spectromodulator and we're up to warp speed again. Thank you, Captain!
And here we go!
This guy not too long ago chewed out people who vibe-coded an old kernel bug back in.
Look at him now.
Look how far he's falling....
Why? because of a race condition?
We've had race conditions in the kernel since the beginning. And, he didn't vibe code an old kernel bug back in..
Race conditions aren't newsworthy at all honestly, unless they cause a security issue
do you even know what a race condition is, what a code review is and what its job is? ask chatgpt
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That's what code review is for lol.
Where is the story here?
LLMs make slop code faster than humans can meaningfully review. If you make LLMs the only review layer, then slop gets through because they have similar biases. Stop making slop.
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how did linus torvalds, the man that would rageface scream at people for doing shit that was perfectly good, that he just didnt like, become the latest to bend over and butter his ass up for the AI cock?
For closed source LLM services controlled by multi-billion dollar corporations even. Dunno if he has always been this cynical or lost sight of any principles he once had.
Torvalds have said a lot of controversial things. Some even against free software. But I think he is a pragmatic, not a cynical.
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- "I only care about the final results and the correctness"
- Looks inside
- Final results are shit and code is just slop
Ahhh, I love AI /s
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Well hopefully he learned something from this.
He learned to do it more... This solved a problem that several Linux engineers and Linus himself have been struggling to solve for over 2 years, and the race condition was discovered in code review and fixed by a suggestion from Linus...
So without AI, we'd still have no solution to this problem that's been unsolved for over 2 years, with AI we have a solution that went through code review which identified a small bug that was then fixed. He still landed a solution to the problem that wouldn't have landed otherwise...
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His very first bug. Until this point, he had 100% error-free code. /s
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