Ju Lin's AI Weblog: LinuxAn independent research notebook on AI engineering, agents, models and the systems around them.https://julin.ai/atom/tags/linux/index.xmlJu Lin2026-08-23T00:00:00+12:00Linus Torvalds on Debugging the Kernel with AIhttps://julin.ai/2026/08/23/linus-ai-debug/2026-08-23T00:00:00+12:002026-08-23T00:00:00+12:00<blockquote>
<p>And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.</p>
<p>I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.</p>
<p>I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.</p>
<p>But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.</p>
<p>This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus <code>round_up()</code> to a <code>round_down()</code>, but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. — Linus</p>
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<p>Linus Torvalds, in the <a href="https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/818bebeb63dd6bf5f4e07e145f6cdbace520a34c">commit message</a> for a kernel fix.</p>
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<p>I troubleshoot every now and then myself, and it’s way harder than programming, tbh. AI can’t always find the root cause. But it’s still a tireless companion to have on-call — it surfaces details I’d have missed on my own, and some of them are the ones that end up pointing the way.</p>