Linus Torvalds on AI-assisted debugging: 'a debug session from hell'

Linus Torvalds has published a Linux kernel commit message describing an AI-assisted debugging session, and the note has since been circulated by Simon Willison. According to the commit message, quoted by Willison, Torvalds called it “a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.”

Torvalds’s account is not uncomplicated praise. He wrote that he would like to call the AI his “tireless helper,” but noted that it “several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.” He added a further observation, suggesting the tools may have been “trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.”

The commit, posted to the Linux kernel’s public git history, gives no further detail in the portion made available beyond these lines. Willison’s post frames the excerpt as a notable first-hand data point on AI coding assistance from one of the field’s most prominent engineers, pairing the tool’s evident usefulness in the debugging grind with its apparent readiness to declare a problem unsolvable.

No additional technical specifics of the underlying bug, the AI system used, or the resolution have been quoted in the material reviewed. The commit remains part of the public Linux kernel repository, dated to the hash referenced in Willison’s citation.