Linus Torvalds used Claude Code to build a Linux page cache fix that hit 23x read throughput, but kernel reviewers found a race before anything merged.

They got to him

  • auzy1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5732·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • darkangelazuarl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      49·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • datavoid@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1322·
        1 day ago

        Hopefully not the case here but it does happen a lot with LLM coding.

        Linus secretly understands nothing about the Linux kernel

    • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1511·
      1 day ago

      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.