They got to him
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 <technobabble here> or something
Forking the Kernel to get it away from him is now a matter of national security
Well hopefully he learned something from this.
This isn’t even newsworthy… Race Conditions aren’t rare.
I think people who use and defend ai use as professionals are pick-mes and have shitty/broken moral compasses.
Works in the other direction too, some people just let the world wash over them and work with whats at hand without deluding themselves into thinking they matter enough to change it.
Ironically, the man in question has actually changed it, but the point stands.
I’d argue that pretending this is a big deal for some cheap hits is even worse though. The system is designed to identify when things like this happen, and it worked perfectly.
Race conditions in general aren’t newsworthy at all.
They’re generally fairly complex, an easy mistake to make (especially when optimising) and rarely obvious… And fairly common…
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
Called it a few weeks ago. Linus losing his marbles. And going full tech-bro fuckhead :(
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?
NoTheChildrenAreWrong.jpg
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.
Middle aged men dementia, induced by money and being surrounded with tech bros and having corporations whisper into your ears…
Removed by mod
i swear to god AI obsession is like some kind of weird contagious mental illness
What… Lmao what even is that picture? Why…
You know what. It doesn’t matter. Lmao
- “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
Going to be a lot of edge cases that get thru because to stop them requires not using the super optimized algorithms.
His very first bug. Until this point, he had 100% error-free code. /s
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.
You had to lean on that assumption that there’s a massive amount being produced to make this point though.
The actual operating point is that the slop is made faster than humans can WRITE it.
Reviewing 100 lines of code thats 90% there and took 3 minutes to produce is faster than writing it from scratch, there’s no getting around that.
For me the issue with it is that all (hyperbole) work is about to become reading instead of creating, dull.
You might save time in writing the code, but you lose time from the code doing things that aren’t in your mental model of the program
Cool assumption. But pretty sure it’s not how things work at all but sounds great…
What actually happens is that you have a long list of multiple maintainers reviewing , and multiple branches for testing, and multiple layers of review too.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/next/process/maintainers.html . See that long list of maintainers for a start.
The actual policy is that everything ends up getting reviewed by a human. If I post a patch, it doesn’t go straight to master
If it’s not being properly tested and maintained, it gets dropped irrespective of what it is (remember devfs?)
Also, I’m not sure about the kernel specifically, but on projects I submitted code to, they often wanted complex patches broken down if possible.
Yes this means the review process is working. What is important to track is if LLM code causes a disproportionately large number of reviews or reviews that take longer because whoever generated the code doesn’t actually know what it is doing. Hopefully not the case here but it does happen a lot with LLM coding.
Hopefully not the case here but it does happen a lot with LLM coding.
Linus secretly understands nothing about the Linux kernel
XZ Utils made it past all those checks with malicious code from a human.
If they’d been more careful with their tarball commits it probably would have made it into the final and commercial distros.
It made into Homebrew for instance.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s not the kernel…
You are correct, also has nothing to do with AI, just malicious actors.
Yep. And the kernel did actually have a backdoor attempt at some point. And it was noticed too https://www.infoq.com/news/2013/10/Linux-Backdoor/
Where is the story here?
“AI bad. AI do bad thing. Let’s point and laugh at AI doing bad thing to delegitimize the technology in the public’s eyes.”
Meanwhile, at work, I interact with coding agents on a regular basis, and the results are pretty good. Then it goes through a local blind review by a more powerful agent, get pushed out to the company’s code review agent, which is designed to be as critical as possible, check the ticket details, make sure everything matches what the design plan says. Depending on the repo, it might even go through an extra security review.
Then, because we aren’t fucking stupid, it goes through the standard code review process by real developers. Sometimes they still find something, sometimes the agent code reviews found way more than a human can. Overall, I trust the current process over our previous one, where some guy spends barely two minutes looking at the code, rubberstamps it, and then QA discovers a few bugs that need fixing, because the damn code review wasn’t as through and critical as it should have been.
Thank you. This is a tool just like everything else. Garbage in equals garbage out. Generative coding in the right hands is an extremely powerful tool.
It’s a difference between kids playing with fireworks. (Vibe coders that know nothing about software development) And rocket scientists at NASA building a new shuttle. (Real developers with controlled thoughtful AI workflows)
Real developer who has done programming every day for over a decade now. AI is shit. It’s bad.
You can dev as long as you like, doesnt make you good at using a new tool by default. Its a tool, it works for millions of people. Why do you think you’re special.
“Real developer who has done assembly every day for ten years now. Compilers are shit. It’s bad”
Real developer who has been programming daily since the 80s. The quality of the models used to vary pretty wildly, but here in the past year or two, everything has gotten way better and most models are pretty capable. Claude, Gemini, GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek. The prices haven’t, but my advice is to ignore the bullshit and just pick the models that work for you. Claude isn’t 25x better than DeepSeek, so it doesn’t deserve to be 25x the cost.
I think Claude and OpenAI have started to realize that nobody’s buying their overpriced token costs. Although, frankly, none of these prices even make sense compared the cost of compute for an average cloud-based GPU cluster. I can’t see how any of these companies are making a profit, just riding the private equality wave until the money runs out. Maybe Amazon, Microsoft, Google, since they own their own hardware, but not OpenAI or Anthropic. China’s going to run them out of business in a few years, anyway.
And of course, if you have the option, use local models. VRAM size is still a bit of a problem, but quantization techniques have gone a long way. You can run a decent model on a personal PC with a bit of tweaking, for home programming tasks, or just a personal model that doesn’t immediately sell your data to Peter Thiel.
My boss has been in it since like the early 80s, programming with basic and assembly. The turning point for him was a month or so ago when Claude found a bug in our mesh firmware that he had been trying to figure out for months. Edge case in hub mode when a message was in route to a device that momentarily dropped from the mesh. Flag gets cleared but no timer set to clear the buffer if the device doesn’t show back up in time. Super fun async RF problems, intermittent and ridiculously hard to find proxy buffer issue that was nearly impossible to reproduce. Old devs made code to lie and say the device was offline when it was still send it’s UID over RDM. So they knew the bug was there for YEARS. With a ton of logs and access to the specific files, Claude found the bug in like 45 mins. It was kind of crazy.
As an electrical engineer who has been doing full stack dev, firmware all the way up to board design and layout for about 16 years now, it’s getting better every single day. My boss is finally coming around after being the biggest shit talker for the last year and half. Is the code perfect? No. Does anyone write perfect code… NO! It is a tool that needs to be driven correctly. If you don’t like it, don’t use it! Is it going away? No! And it doesn’t look like anything we say is going to change that. Live with it, it’s the only option.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Everyone has their own experiences too. Be fucking nice tho, why is everyone so hostile. Go back to reddit if you want to be an asshole. Not you dread beef, just in general.
the level of smugness in this reply, to compare AI slopists with NASA rocket scientists, its fucking astounding
The smugness in assuming that ‘anyone who uses x tool is stupid.’
Self awareness at critical low.
I was making a point about people who are experts in their field, and people who know nothing about said field.
Username checks out.
Username checks out.
the last refuge for people who cant mount a proper retort. As expected of someone like you. You grab the low hanging fruit, blind to the trap, then think you’re a world leading genius for going directly where you’re directed.
Wow! Says the person who started off throwing insults by calling me smug. I only agreed with your own assement of yourself via your username, if you took that as insult, it’s a you problem. But, at least you know that insulting people is disrespectful. Maybe try heeding your own advice before you start talking shit to strangers on the Internet. How “astoundingly” oblivious of you to make that comment.
You okay man? You read so much into my comment it makes me worry a little for ya. Hope you have a better day man.
replies to the same comment twice youre reading too much into this
Slop, not even once
AI bad. Bugs never occurred when human built code. We had to come up with a completely new term, unknown in programming before, called “race condition”.
Linus probably uses AI effectively, but the question is how long until his skill deteriorate because of it.
Linus hasn’t programmed much for years. He is a manager. I imagine lots of managers are seduced by vibe coding. Programming can be a real slog and takes so much time. Why walk when you can drive?
The problem isn’t with Linus losing his skills but sustainability of the entire FOSS space. I don’t think many young programmers are ever going to learn the lessons Linus did as a young person and those lessons are still very relevant for low level code working closely with hardware. When the pre-LLM programmers age out I think we are going to be treading water for years with LLM regurgitating variations on the same old human code without much direction or innovation.
It is arguably a different situation for something like webdev which is mostly paint by numbers or enterprise software that is solving the same problems over and over.
This ^^^
It’s a, err, medium term problem. There’s going to be a serious deficit of attentive human problem solvers before anything can “automate” that away.
I’d be more concerned with him and people of that generation aging out maintaining the project first, and newer generations not having the skills to begin with to carry it forward.
Yeah. Linux maintenace becomes a paid subscription through the ai providers
It’s hard to believe he’s not also thinking about succession and actively mentoring younger folks. The Linux kernel is his baby and he seems enmeshed enough on the community level. He’s smart enough to not simply leave it to chance.
Tarvads successor has been named a long time ago, although I don’t believe he’s “young” but succession has been arranged for the Linux kernel.
of that generation
Ouch.
I think ‘we’ have about 20 years left in us. That’s long enough for an entire new pet language to be born, surge, wane, and then die. …or 27 entirely new web frameworks.
Linus is 56. You think he’ll still be actively maintaining Linux into his mid-70s?
Code monkeys of a certain age
I don’t know. People are creative. They’ll get burned and learn from their mistakes. At least, the ones who do will survive in their careers — then pass on the knowledge, repeat. So I imagine Linus will be replaced just fine when he retires. Wait until we’re 2 or 3 generations into using AI for development. It’s not like people are rocks; people don’t tend to just keep sinking.
Skill of what? If anything his skill of how not to fuck up will improve.
Amanda Caswell
Amanda Caswell is an AI journalist, certified prompt engineer, and technology commentator whose work and expertise have been featured on Fox News and CBS News.
certified prompt engineer 🙄
lol “certified prompt engineer” is a thing?
certified prompt engineer 🤣
She gipity… If not she mine as well be. We are yammering over a techno fart.
Amanda Caswell is an AI journalisturd, certified prompturd engineer, and turdnology commentaturder whose slop and nonsense has been featured on Fox News and CBS News.
On Tuesday, he submitted a 10-patch series that delivered a 23-fold throughput improvement in a synthetic benchmark
Impressive, probably kind of like I can answer math questions very very fast.
Reviewers have since identified a race condition and raised concerns about memory reclamation.
That what I thought, I can answer math questions fast, but I don’t claim to be able to answer them correctly.
It seems that after the initial AI-generated patches there’s been good discussion amongst the kernel devs about sorting out the issues, and a few revisions already that have tidied things up a bit.
So if after all that there ends up being a good performance improvement directly from a revised AI-created patch, what do I do with my pitchfork? Still raised angrily? Half-mast? Do I just let the torch smoulder?
You have to vow to use a new fork (which someone else should totally create) which does not contain this one specific patch.
which someone else should totally create
Congratulations and thank you for volunteering! I look forward to your repo release. You are never allowed to stop maintaining this fork.
I look forward to the community providing an outline of tools and techniques that I’m allowed to use and/or being labeled as woke/nazi depending on which brand of social media outrage is currently waxing.
Man, people really don’t like systemd
And cause more environmental harm through inefficient tech?
Based
Wonder how much time it had taken without AI
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 article mentions he had been working on solving the issue for 18 months already… so at least that long.
I’m still mad because the source is still tainted. You can guarantee that the contributions of unwilling people, { who 1) did not intend their work to be used by a for profit LLM, and 2) actively do not want their work used by an LLM at all }, is part of these changes.
Scraping isn’t reading, etc etc. But also when did we just stop respecting people’s wishes with the stuff they post? Like I made my own word scramble js script because a website owner didn’t get back to me on whether I could use theirs, even though the script is right there to copy paste.
These companies just did the yolo founder-disrupter impatient thing when they could have been chill and done this all legit.
So you’re saying the review process worked as designed?
Maybe it did, but apparently the code was not properly reviewed initially, so there could be other hidden problems.
Of course that’s the same for human made code, but there’s a problem in only judging code from how it performs, and not actually understanding the code. And that seems to be the situation with a lot of AI code.And particularly disturbing when the human understanding failure is from the original and lead Linux developer.
100% that is the worst place to have the problem originate.
I have rarely disagreed with Linus Torvalds on things regarding the kernel, and maybe I’m wrong, but I strongly disagree with him on this issue. Contributing code nobody understands cannot be a good thing.The code still undergoes the exact same code review as before, because humans were the original slop coders.
The standards needed for code to be accepted haven’t changed at all. Even the code Linus personally is reviewed…
The code still undergoes the exact same code review as before.
That’s not good enough, because it is well documented that AI often make mistakes and absolutely needs to undergo way stricter review.
It is also well documented that although you can achieve some results quickly, AI code also quickly becomes impossible to maintain.If nobody understands the code, as it seems was the case here, and it is introduced anyway, the kernel is doomed to deteriorate.
My wife has already noticed deteriorating quality in Debian, with system hangs after they loosened the requirements for AI code. The quality of Debian now is lower than it has been in a decade!
Maybe you need to watch something like this:
Contributing code nobody understands cannot be a good thing.
You people act like Linux adopted an all-AI pipeline.
Is it an understanding failure, an unexpected interaction, or just an existing issue now exposed? A 23x performance increase could very well expose an existing race condition that systems weren’t fast enough to run into.
People make mistakes. Software bugs existing at all is proof of this. This is certainly not the first time a change Torvalds approved has an issue, and it won’t be the last.
There’s a reason code is reviewed, and there’s a reason people still go through after it is approved and verify. The process is working exactly as designed, the way it has for decades before AI coding.
Expecting absolute perfection is ridiculous, the anti-AI circlejerk acting like only AI fucks up just makes them look ridiculous. Any developer could have developed this fix, and there would be no article. Nothing in this issue is specific to AI usage and treating it like it is somehow special just undermines arguments against AI slop and vibe coding in general.
the anti-AI circlejerk
I’d say do better but that’s not likely to happen.
So, let me get this right. You’re disapproving on how things were handled based on your speculation of how it went?
Not based on speculation, based on numerous analysis of the problems with using AI code you don’t understand.
Clearly Linus failed to understand the code, otherwise he wouldn’t have suggested it for submission.You seem to have a problem with criticism of Linus, is it a religious thing?
You understand it less it sounds like.
- Race Conditions are common. This isn’t new to AI. Nobody writes stories about them though unless they lead to security issues (like with XFS, which had one for 10 years and only fixed recently).
- There is a lot happening in the kernel, its not always a matter of looking in one tiny location. A race condition is pretty broad and can lead to many things.
- Patches get rejected all the time, for reasons including race conditions which are identified.
- If you check the post, other developers had tried and failed to fix the same issue. He’s not the only one. It was just yet another failed attempt
- Optimisation is HARD, and always has been.
- Finally, you say “suggested it for submission”. That code would go to a staging repo first for testing. He wasn’t suggesting pushing it immediately to the main tree…
- Standard development tools (at least for my development work) wouldn’t catch race conditions (maybe commercial ones / high end ones would)… AI is actually far better at detecting these things
This isn’t a unique or interesting story in any capacity… It’s boring and normal
Race Conditions are common.
For Christ sake, of course I know that.
Of course of course. How dare you blaspheme against our Lord and Saviour, filthy infidel!
But anyway, I’d like to be as enlightened as you. Could you name any of those numerous analyses that detail exactly what Torvalds did and what he failed to understand?
No I can’t, because those are so general and commonly known, that if you somehow are unaware, you must have been living under a rock for the past year.
The second option is that you are just trolling or for some reason is in denial.
Either way I’m not wasting my time on any of those options.
Only while there are still reviewers who care to review the slop. Which is a rare breed and will quickly soon vanish.
I bet some projects will get more tolerance and love than others, based on value and utility. The kernel will get more, and Systemd will get less.
Yes, but it’s bad because software has bugs.
This kind of code has to be done with formal modelling, including when written by humans. alloytools.org looking good to me.
AI written article
What do you base that claim on?
It says:Oct 14th, 2026 6:59pm by Amanda Caswell
Right there in your link, it says she’s AI:
Amanda Caswell is an AI journalist
/s
I believe it should be spelled “meat proxy”
I just saw someone call it “cuck coding” (vs “vibe coding”), because you just sit there.
This would make meat proxies Code Cucks instead.
Goddammit you had me there until the /s. 🤣
“AI journalist” is just as confusing as “child killer”
Is it an AI pretending to be a journo (is it a child who’s a killer), or is it a journo writing about AI (is it a killer targeting children)?
English would prefer killer child instead of child killer for the former because killer can behave as a qualifier.
Similarly, AI can act as a qualifier and while sports journalist is valid, any journalist writing about AI code, AI agent, AI whatever must realize what AI journalist sounds like
word play is fun
Not really… “AI journalist” might refer to a plain old astroturfing spambot, or to one piloting a reverse centaur, but it’s still the same old spambot when it comes to it, and it’ll still be spewing the same worthless slop, so the distinction is mostly moot, merely making the latter option a bit more tragic.
It’s just a super weird article. It goes into extreme detail randomly, mentioning specific function names and memory mechanisms, but doesn’t explain any of it.
This happens when an LLM reads a bunch of pages with stuff it doesn’t have much internal knowledge about, and then tries to summarize that into an article.
It’s either written by a LLM that’s been instructed to drag the little info it had forever, or written by a human that is very convincing at producing robotic, unnaturally articulated text.
Title, summary, first paragraph are basically the same sentence slightly reformulated, and then the rest is going back to every bit of it like a list of bullet points, almost failing to add anything valuable.
I found it painful to parse, and it really does not feel human-like.
it is a real person, but GPTZero gives it a 100/100, and given she’s a proud “prompt engineer” I’m inclined to believe she doesn’t do all the writing without… “assistance”.
This happens when an LLM reads a bunch of pages with stuff it doesn’t have much internal knowledge about, and then tries to summarize that into an article.
LLMs do not have knowledge about anything.
Books contain knowledge, I doubt you will find many English scholars that disagree with that. In the same way, LLMs contain knowledge as well, they just also have the ability to output that knowledge in a more dynamic way than a book. You can argue some words that are more anthropomorphic, but knowledge has been attributed to inanimate objects for millennia.
Tell me you don’t know how deep learning works without telling me you don’t know how deep learning works.
Tell me you have zero education in epistemology without telling me you have zero education in epistemology.
Not justification for the accusation.
Everything is possibly AI slob, that doesn’t justify calling everything AI slob.This comment is ai slop.
these downvotes are ai slop
You’re not wrong. This entire story is not unique in any capacity honestly. The story even points out other developers have tried to fix this issue with problem.
The only thing that changed, is that someone saw this time it said “AI”, and got a boner thinking about the upvotes and attention they could receive
They called it Linux to celebrate the man. At what point do we have to change it to Ainux?
Ainuch.
To celebrate Ainu people, right?
