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I was investigating a FreeBSD kernel problem way way above my pay grade / skill level. A very important problem manifesting as a race condition, but it wasn't getting attention at the time and I had no choice but to start investigating myself.

So I threw the LLM at it (Kimi K3 actually not bad!).

It found the problem immediately. And trying to come up with solutions, I suggested we just move a single line of code to fix the order of operations and fix it.

Now just looking at the code, I couldn't see where/why this would be problematic to move, but kernels can be very complex and I've never read any of this code before.

This actually DID sort of fix it.

But the model warned me to not do it because it would break things.

It was right, it did. It fixed my problem but introduced others, and when moved to one location I was testing it actually caused kernel panics.

But really the important thing is that it instantly identified the problem for me.

The correct solution ended up being fairly simple, just adding something new to happen in the right place and not relying on that other event. So it required a combo kernel and userspace change.

But at least the model was smart enough to tell me that it couldn't just be fixed the way I proposed.

In the process I learned a bunch about this area, so 10/10 would prompt again.