“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.
This is something OSS projects everywhere are dealing with, no matter what their previous policies were nor what their personal beliefs about LLMs are.
I can’t believe people here are acting like Linus and Linux “brought this on themselves.” Vibecoding spammers do not care about a project’s guidelines, nor their maintainers’ workload; they’re coming either way. And friction + stricter contribution standards are how other projects are dealing with this, too.
The kernel is already shit for humans to contribute to🤷
Let’s be honest, mailing lists are garbage and just increase the barrier to contribution. They lack nearly everything useful for reviewing code and giving feedback.
They are wonderful for LLMs though. Somebody unwilling to learn the arcane crap needed to contribute just pushes it out to an LLM. It’s easier for them to contribute than humans.
Linus, buddy, you’re the one that opened the floodgates by welcoming LLM code with open hands…
But he didn’t “welcome LLM code with open hands” really - he took a relatively neutral stance and said it needed to pass the same standards that human code does.
he didn’t. it’s more like him attempting to evaluate if it’s any useful, and news websites suddenly sending out misleading headlines that linus is now ‘vibecoding’ or smth
That’s not remotely what happened. Does it make you feel better to turn the truth into a cartoon with no nuance and obvious villains? I don’t suspect you’ll be argued into being reasonable, but people reading the comments should know that you are spreading lies.
Linus used an LLM to experiment in a branch. There is absolutely no evidence that he actually submitted any kernel code written by an LLM. He shouldn’t have to hide his experiments with technology because some people are mindless drones who will become enraged and lie about what he’s actually done.
There is absolutely no evidence that he actually submitted any kernel code written by an LLM.
The person you replied to never made such a claim.
Does it make you feel better to turn the truth into a cartoon with no nuance and obvious villains?
Edit:
Okay my bad, I shouldn’t put words in his mouth. I’ll let him speak for himself.
Edit 2: Fixed grammatical ambiguity in the original
But he isn’t saying “damn people using AI”, is he?
If you purposefully remove all nuance from what people say, you attribute to them a ridiculous position, but that’s your problem not theirs.
I’ve been sitting on a few patches from several years ago. I never submitted them because I don’t want to go jump through the hoops again.
I get it though. Even before LLMs, the internet was already going down a path of slopification, with github repos being spammed with CV padder pull requests.
Is this the Linus who leaked the whole Linux Kernel source code on GitHub? Wow!
I get it, quality vs quantity
suggestion of his was to create an AGENTS. md that makes generating kernel code expensive in compute and token time.
Why would one use the agents file if it makes it expensive?
I guess it states testing, simulating, double checking the submission. As should be done and would be done by humans. Instead of one shot guess in the wilds.
