415.tech
AI & tech, from the frontlines of Silicon Valley

Torvalds credits an AI for the drm/xe debug grunt work and lets it write the commit message

Linus Torvalds credited an AI assistant with much of the grunt work and analysis on a drm/xe debugging session he called hell, and let it write the commit message on 818bebeb. The assistant repeatedly called the bug unsolvable and proposed writing a report instead, yet kept adding debug code and analyzing the results faithfully when pushed — stubbornness at the keyboard, not the model, carried the fix.

Source: simonwillison.net

Post on XEmail

the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it

Linus Torvalds

Why this matters

  • → AI now coauthors Linux kernel commits, handling analysis that humans found intractable.
  • → Stubborn iteration beats model pessimism—AI quit early; human persistence solved it.
Stubbornness beats AI
Also in this edition