Comment by sigbottle
7 days ago
I'm actually curious about AI progress:
There's no way the AI is a priori understanding codebases with millions of LoC now. We've tried that already, it failed. What it is doing now is setting up its own extremely powerful test harnesses and getting the information and testing it efficiently.
Sure, its semantic search is already strong, but the real lesson that we've learned from 2025 is that tooling is way more powerful.
That's cool! I've always wanted to learn how kernel devs properly test stuff reliably but it seemed hard. As someone who's dabbled in kernel dev for his job. Like real variable hardware, and not just manual testing shit.
Honestly, AI has only helped me become a better SWE because no one else has the time or patience to teach me.
What do you mean "a priori understanding codebases"? Quantify it and let's test specifically what you mean. Linux is huge.
> What do you mean "a priori understanding codebases"?
I took him to be distinguishing between (1) just reading the code/docs and reasoning about it, and (2) that + crafting and running tests.
I don't think that's it; both reading the code and running tests are a posteriori capabilities.
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The fact that it's millions of LoC is borderline irrelevant in that context, you don't need to have it all in context to find bugs in a handful of files.