I chased a rare crash in highly-threaded code. It popped up now and then; earlier fixes didn’t stick. I suspected an advanced concurrency issue. I also asked Gemini, Copilot/Codex, and Claude for help. They agreed with me: surely something subtle—epoll, re-queueing, ownership flags…
We were all wrong—and, importantly, I was wrong in the same way the AIs were. Their analyses reinforced my initial hypothesis. The fact that the static analyzer reported nothing reinforced it even more—after all, that’s “proven non-AI tech.” In hindsight, if I had thought earlier about the limits of these tools (AI and non-AI), I might have changed direction sooner—but I was also primed by experience: in this part of the codebase, bugs are almost always complex.
Continue reading “When Humans and AIs Overthink: a “complex” rsyslog crash that wasn’t”