Comment by qarl
16 days ago
Yes, I understand the difference in rigor.
I refuse to believe the six year delay here was getting people to test a patch.
Which, actually, Claude Code will also do quite well.
16 days ago
Yes, I understand the difference in rigor.
I refuse to believe the six year delay here was getting people to test a patch.
Which, actually, Claude Code will also do quite well.
Not sure why you'd refuse to believe that when a single, simple patch in Linux can take months to make it into a kernel release. Here we're looking at 300 patches scattered throughout a kernel with millions of LoC. That's going to translate to a lot of mailing list back and forth even if every change was accepted on the first try without a fuss.
The lag there is not due to the review time. How many maintainers were involved? 300? Because I'm still finding it hard to understand how the work of 300 people handling 300 commits cannot be parallelized into months (per your own stat.)
To be clear my original statement was that the bottleneck was most likely not mechanical code changes (where CC would have the most direct speedup) but everything else involved in the process (testing, discussion/approval, inclination towards caution, deliberately narrowly scoped changes, etc).
Not that the Linux kernel approval procedures couldn't be streamlined, work couldn't be parallelized, or anything else like that, which would be a different discussion entirely.
You stated that Claude Code could have significantly sped up the process, so the burden of evidence here should be on how specifically these patches would have benefited/time saved from using LLMs. Hand wavingly saying "LLMs = faster" is too vague/broad of a claim without providing any evidence (and also unfalsifiable).
5 replies →