“Torvalds said that the time has come to make it harder for new people to contribute code to the kernel. People like Kroah-Hartman have spent years trying to teach people how to contribute; it is time to stop doing that, he said.”
https://lwn.net/Articles/1099594/
It is difficult to summarize exactly how Linus got to this point. Most of the discussion at this years Summit appears to have been related to AI assisted code and how the maintainers are dealing with the increase in code submissions to LKML. Many of the maintainers expressed varying levels of frustration with AI assisted drive-by code submissions. Linus’ train of thought is that they make it intentionally more difficult for humans to contribute. A later suggestion of his was to create an AGENTS. md that makes generating kernel code expensive in compute and token time.
So, who gets the “I told you so” prize first?
When he came out talking about allowing LLM code contributions everyone told him this would happen.
they are still allowing LLM code that has been properly validated by a human
“AI assisted drive-by code submissions” are still the problem
nobody gets the luddite prize
When he came out talking about allowing LLM code contributions everyone told him this would happen.
He has criticized the excessive hype around GenAI/LLMs long before. Torvalds has generally a very pragmatic approach, not a black-and-white one.
Three things more:
The Linux kernel is Torvalds project.
The fact that experienced kernel developers can sometimes use LLMs to their advantage does not mean that the average Joe Codemonkey can do it. These algorithms are often described as a kind of competence multiplicator - but experience from education shows that they are more risky than that and can hinder learning.
And third, we should in this question not put too much weight in the opinion of influential people. Behind the GenAI tech are huge corporations which pour billions of money into it. It is likely that they can pressure and bribe people and that they also pay influencers and bloggers to tout their stuff. Making decisions dependent on single influential persons, however competent and acclaimed they are, is therefore dangerous (see Eric Raymond, Eva Kaili or Gerhard Schröder). Torvalds is not Jesus, and I am pretty sure he didn’t apply for that role.
I was recently talking to a coworker about this same topic. I told them that one of my fears about LLMs is that the flood of vide-coded sloptributions would eventually make FOSS less free. Maintainers wouldn’t be able to keep up with the volume, and would resort to locking down contributions to well established community members and contributors.
Basically, gone will be the days of skilled randos contributing freely to projects, or beginners jumping in to help with easy, small issues/fixes. Now you’ll need to be well known, be vetted formally by other contributors, etc.
The agents.md compute sabotage idea is interesting, essentially Anubis but for your repository.
There might be a whole lot more forks out in the world 😖. Ultimately that’s what I’d do. Don’t want me to contribute? Fine! I’ll make my own with Blackjack and hookers!
You’re free to use a vibe coded linux kernel that you trust enough to run everything on your whole computer. I don’t
What’s he gonna do about code coming from corporations? We all know now they all vibe-code everything!
His dumbass brought this upon himself by allowing ai slop.
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