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

On Tue, 2026-07-21 at 17:57 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Jul 2026 at 17:18, Jori Koolstra <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >=20
> > Can't we just deprioritize invasive contributions to core
> > subsystems by
> > unknown people?
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> And that trust can happen either due to knowing the people involved
> and trusting them - regardless of whether they then might use AI
> tools.
>=20
> 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..
>=20
> But basically, without trusting a submission some way, the submission
> shouldn't be accepted.
>=20
> And the corollary to that basic issue of trust is that invasive
> contributions from unknown people should be much less likely to be
> accepted.
>=20
> (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).

In my experience, "large and invasive" hasn't been the biggest problem.
It's rather the fact that the people submitting have no understanding
of the subsystems they are patching, and so they (and the AI) overstate
the claims of importance. Suddenly, I'm seeing a slew of "security
vulnerabilities" that are Cced to the stable kernel channel, and
sometimes the security channels, and therefore scream "Drop everything
you're doing and look at me now!".

IOW: the problem is intrusiveness onto the maintainer's schedule, which
also eventually leads to fatigue. Particularly so, when none of those
claims actually stand up to scrutiny. The patch itself may be nominally
correct, but it's never a "drop everything you're doing" issue.

--=20
Trond Myklebust
Linux NFS client maintainer, Hammerspace
[email protected], [email protected]