The mailing list change the article is referring to: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20261009083137.3-1-sashal@kernel.org/

I wonder if the original rule was too broad and it was leading to noise? I'd prefer to have attribution when code is written, but not in all cases

If someone uses an LLM to brainstorm or track down a bug, then confirms it and writes the fix by hand, adding attribution might end up being noise.

Meanwhile if someone uses the LLM to write the fix, then that should get attribution

I hate to be that guy but there are compilers with non-deterministic optimization strategies and they do tend to be the most performant. They're just generally disallowed in major project distributions because the maintainers want the artifact to be verifiable by and end user for security reasons.

That quote was someone else

"LLMs are good enough now," said Greg Kroah-Hartman, a veteran Linux kernel maintainer, at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in South Korea in August. "They've gotten good enough to find bugs because LLMs, AI, are just pattern matchers and code is nothing but patterns in a specific format."

Also to be fair, that quote is about finding bugs and the guy might not have been talking about using AI to patch them. The article makes it sound that way, but the article also seems overly confident and pro-AI about some other things too.

You can deterministically find something that is clearly defined, but bugs don't fall into that category

Being a million monkeys or not, it is a tool. The relevant definition for tool is:

something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation

That's not to say it's a good tool, or that it's a tool being used appropriately by many people. What even is appropriate use of AI?

Accountability should be definitely be properly assigned to the user. I've heard of tradies blaming their tools for shitty work, but I've never heard of one actually holding their hammer accountable..

just because AI can find a working pattern doesn't make it good

I have seen so much from AI supporters saying "it can be a good tool" to save time, but I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone try to make the claim that it's a tool that leads to better code. That should be very telling.

Fame does something to people, either that or he's burnt out and this is a midlife crisis. I love unix based operating systems, but sometimes I feel Linux was the wrong thing to get popular unfortunately. It abandons so much of the core philosophy.

Given the same input, a compiler will always produce the same output, down to the last bit. The same cannot be said about AI

LLM's have something like a temperature setting that is producing the intentional randomness, so that you prompting it is not going around in circles all the time. (if you are running an army of agents this is actually important for usefulness)

Anyway this is not an inherent LLM thing, it can be turned off.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD both allow AI and contain AI-generated code. NetBSD requires prior approval but doesn't outright ban it.

then people can turn to the devs and Linus and say “I told you so.”

I bet his response will be an email with a dozen variations of "fuck you for insinuating that I have any responsibility, I didn't approve that specific commit, it's all 's fault who is a fucking imbecile"

Linus and say “I told you so.”

Linus fully approves this. What imagination land do you live in?

People using AI push a lot more code in a shorter amount of time. That deluge makes it much more likely for bad code, intentional or not, to slip by.

"Just leave it to a few trusted devs"

Some bad actors can play the long game. The XZ Utils backdoor is a very recent example of a contributor trying to abuse a backdoor he put there himself, after 2 years of posing as a helpful person.

"Let AI review it"

If humans are prone to mistakes, why would anyone leave a probabilistic program that is known to make bad decisions at random and that has, on more than one occasion, "cheated" to pass quality tests, deleted files it shouldn't and is still suceptible to prompt attacks, review it?

I understand the sentiment of "if the AI generated code is good, allow it", but the "productivity" gains in writing code means that, sooner or later, the person using the AI will care less and less about reading and preemptively catching possible errors because there'll be so many alterations that he either has to spend a month reading, or just skim over and accept.

BSDs allow AI too