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

On Tue, 21 Jul 2026 at 17:18, Jori Koolstra <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Can't we just deprioritize invasive contributions to core subsystems by
> unknown people?

I think that's something that should be happening pretty much by
default, and has nothing to do with AI except in the sense that AI can
make it easier for random unknown people to generate likely-looking
large and invasive patches.

Basically, I think a big issue in open source - in fact in my opinion
*the* biggest issue - is the basic notion of "trust" in contributions.

And that trust can happen either due to knowing the people involved
and trusting them - regardless of whether they then might use AI
tools.

Or it can happen by looking at the patch itself, and trusting the
contribution that way (and then the submitter grows his or her trust
over time that way..

But basically, without trusting a submission some way, the submission
shouldn't be accepted.

And the corollary to that basic issue of trust is that invasive
contributions from unknown people should be much less likely to be
accepted.

(Here I define "invasive contribution" as something that is hard to
verify as a patch - there can be large and invasive patches that are
easy to verify with tooling, so it's not necessarily about the size
per se).

Now, I think the other side of AI - and this is where Sashiko comes in
- is that it basically does end up being a tool that can then increase
the trust in the patch.

So AI giveth, and AI taketh away. But the basic issue shouldn't be AI
per se, it should be that notion of "trust".

And yes, some maintainers will then trust tools like Sashiko more than others.

And that's perfectly fine.

            Linus