“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.
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.
The quote sounds like a penalty. And your guess sounds like the minimum work that has to be done anyway. Completely different framing.
“Penalty”? Fucking hell, that’s exactly how my AI development is done. My personal tools repo that isn’t shared with anyone has almost 2k tests that run every time there is a change. Also the documentation is updated, and multiple adversarial agents are run to challenge every decision from a security standpoint and a simplicity standpoint. And there’s another guard I’m forgetting.
If you’re going to code with AI, that’s the least you can do.
“My solution is to throw so many digital monkeys at the problem that they will write the works of Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare isn’t the point — it works. It has saved countless hours of production support investigations, and has made it possible to answer questions and catch problems no one has been able to do in years because it would be prohibitively time consuming. I’m answering questions in a couple of minutes that would otherwise have just been a finger pointed at another team.
Why can’t this guest log in? WAF problem because another team has a piss-poor page design? I would never have even thought of that. Forwards log entries to networking team for resolution.
Under capitalism, this token burn makes the shareholders climax at the expense of all else - datacenters are oligarch crack.