Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Other LLM-related topics - tags, newcomers, etc

On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 12:24:45PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 05:08:40PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 11:28:25AM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 09:09:27AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> > 
> > > > - There are many first-time contributors coming in with LLM-generated
> > > >  patches.  At times, I could swear that every one of them is focused on
> > 
> > > >  Our maintainers are not scaling to handle this new flood, and I fear we
> > > >  are going to see some unfortunate things merged.  One LLM-driven newcomer
> > > >  recently nearly succeeded in establishing himself as the maintainer of
> > > >  lib/.  How do we hold the line against this stuff while remaining open to
> > > >  new developers?
> > 
> > > Shouldn't it be a merits question rather than a tools question?
> > 
> > > If the commits are correct, does it matter if they were written with an LLM? we
> > > can insist more on supplying tests and demonstrating correctness, something we
> > > seem to be doing quite rarely right now.
> > 
> > The issue (which a number of projects are facing) is as much one of
> > volume as anything else, the code generation machines are enabling the
> > generation and submision of volumes of code where things were previously
> > constrained by human factors.  It can turn into a bit of a DoS.  I don't
> > have any particularly bright ideas here but it's definitely a thing.
> 
> Sure, we're seeing quite the increase in patch submissions, but I'm trying to
> argue that the issue isn't a new one: lack of maintainers, trusted reviewers,
> and maintainer burnout has been a topic at each kernel summit for as long as I
> can remember. AI just kicks it up a notch.
> 
> My concern is that if we focus on the AI aspect, we still won't be solving the
> underlying issue.
> 
> I'm hoping we can figure out how to get maintainers great tooling, testing, and
> community, rather than figuring out how to block a developer who uses LLM.
> Maybe AI would actually be a great catalyst for that as well?

Can't we just deprioritize invasive contributions to core subsystems by
unknown people? If there is no man in the middle, learning to navigate
the code to do anything even remotely significant takes A LOT of time. I
can know, as I have been doing that recently with the VFS, and I still
know only a few pieces.

I must have spent several hundreds of hours in the past year. What is
the chance someone spends this amount of time as a hobbyist, but then
does not engage with the community in any other way (discussion,
conferences, etc.)?

Of course there are Yitang Zhang's in the world (although he was still
not totally unknown), but this is vanishingly rare.

> 
> -- 
> Thanks,
> Sasha