Linus Torvalds on How AI is Impacting the Hunt for Linux Kernel Bugs (techstrong.ai) 6
Linus Torvalds spoke this week at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit North America, reports ZDNet — and described how AI is impacting Linux kernel development:
"In the last six months, we've seen a lot more commits," Torvalds noted, estimating that "the last two releases, it's been about 20% more commits than we had in the previous releases over many years.... The real change that happened in the last six months was that the AI tools actually got good enough for a lot of people... we're seeing a definite uptick in just development on pretty much all fronts...."
On the positive side, he framed AI-discovered bugs as "short-term pain" with long-term benefits: "When AI finds a bug in any source code... long term is you found a bug, we fixed it, that the end result is better for it." After all, he continued, "I think finding bugs is great, because the real problem is all the bugs you didn't find..." For small teams or solo maintainers, he said, flood-style AI bug reports can cause real burnout, especially when "it's a bug report, and when you ask for more information, the person has done a drive-by and doesn't even answer your questions anymore."
The AI news site Techstrong notes this quote from Torvalds. "I have a love-hate relationship with AI. I actually really like it from a technical angle, I love the tools, I find it very useful and interesting, but it is definitely causing pain points." The chief challenge with AI is that it forces people to change how they work, he found. People get into a rut, and AI challenges their norm. The Linux security mailing list got the brunt of this new wave of AI-generated commits. Not all bugs are security issues, but when "people think that when they find a bug with AI, the first reaction seems to sometimes be let's send it to the security list, because this may have security implications," Torvalds said. As a result, the security list — watched over by a small group of maintainers — was overrun by duplicate entries...
The Linux project learned to manage the bug influx with a set number of tools to sort out and deprioritize the obvious drive-by reports (ones where the person submitting the report won't even answer any questions). One tool, Sashiko, reviews all the patches submitted on the mailing list. "Sometimes the review is not great, but quite often it finds issues and it asks questions and says, 'Hey, what about this issue?'" he said.
Linux also updated their documentation, partly just to address "an uptick in bug and security reports from discoveries made in full or in part with AI."
On the positive side, he framed AI-discovered bugs as "short-term pain" with long-term benefits: "When AI finds a bug in any source code... long term is you found a bug, we fixed it, that the end result is better for it." After all, he continued, "I think finding bugs is great, because the real problem is all the bugs you didn't find..." For small teams or solo maintainers, he said, flood-style AI bug reports can cause real burnout, especially when "it's a bug report, and when you ask for more information, the person has done a drive-by and doesn't even answer your questions anymore."
The AI news site Techstrong notes this quote from Torvalds. "I have a love-hate relationship with AI. I actually really like it from a technical angle, I love the tools, I find it very useful and interesting, but it is definitely causing pain points." The chief challenge with AI is that it forces people to change how they work, he found. People get into a rut, and AI challenges their norm. The Linux security mailing list got the brunt of this new wave of AI-generated commits. Not all bugs are security issues, but when "people think that when they find a bug with AI, the first reaction seems to sometimes be let's send it to the security list, because this may have security implications," Torvalds said. As a result, the security list — watched over by a small group of maintainers — was overrun by duplicate entries...
The Linux project learned to manage the bug influx with a set number of tools to sort out and deprioritize the obvious drive-by reports (ones where the person submitting the report won't even answer any questions). One tool, Sashiko, reviews all the patches submitted on the mailing list. "Sometimes the review is not great, but quite often it finds issues and it asks questions and says, 'Hey, what about this issue?'" he said.
Linux also updated their documentation, partly just to address "an uptick in bug and security reports from discoveries made in full or in part with AI."
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