cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53100937
“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 wonder how effective a master/apprentice situation could be for this? Like someone gets taken under the wing of a veteran contributor and all their work is vetted and signed off on my that person before being submitted. They get taught how to do things and in return maybe do some of the busywork for the veteran. Because your always going to need new contributors but you need a way to vet them.