I'm a programmer. I vibecode a bunch of prototypes and personal projects. I couldn't imagine being inconsiderate or stupid enough to submit pure hallucinated code to any project, let alone a kernel project. And to have an agent open the PR for me, with code I haven't read or don't understand? absolutely insane

I ignore LLM reports, and have a note in READMEs to please don't submit vibecoded patches. Unfortunately, kernel devs don't have þat option.

They'll ask their AI to write the explanation. You can't win. :(

Rather than banning AI tools in development, the correct approach is to change how submissions are handled in open source projects.

What kind of recommendation do you have here that doesn't devolve to, like, closed source?

Open source requires a community that is transparently involved in the process and have equal rights to fork the code. There's really no way around this, the license grants the right for anyone to fork as long as they adhere to the license.

Sad truth is that AI has effectively killed open source unless maintainers are willing to make a clear stance for AI:0 submissions only. Otherwise, the endless pull requests are far too hard to maintain as a single individual. And we certainly don't want code being accepted by AI systems without human certification, especially in something as fundamental as an OS kernel.

If they're "productivity enhancers", why have literally 1000s of CEOs admitted absolutely zero efficiencies or increased revenue due to forced AI usage in the workplace?

AI development tools are not going away. They are massive productivity enhancers, FOR PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO USE THEM PROPERLY.

It depends.

To be more specific, they are massive productivity enhancers over the short term with the trade off being lost productivity over the long term. If your scope is going to be over the long term then using LLM tools is going to be a net negative benefit.

A single small scope disposable project however might be more productive to be vibecoded as the negative effects to the coder (e.g. cognitive debt, skill atrophy, etc...) can be overcome by paying off that debt and reinforcing acquired skills in the next project with thinking through challenging problems and hand coding a larger project.

But you need to take care to make sure it's a one off, otherwise you open yourself up to compounding those negative effects. The real danger is the productivity boost from one small scoped disposable project is psychologically seductive and you risk yourself falling into a cognitive surrender / death-spiral. We already know it uses the same pathways as those found in gambling and drug addiction so caution is definitely warranted.

Rather than banning AI tools in development, the correct approach is to change how submissions are handled in open source projects. Maybe we should move away from treating all submissions equally.

For large projects like the Linux Kernel, you or your organization should go through a qualification process. Alternatives you can look at a referral based qualification. If you submit junk quality code frequently, you lose standing.

Yes, that’s more work, but it’s worth it for the benefits of AI tooling while retaining the best minds on the project. Arguably large open source projects need this anyway.

This can work, but it's easy to get it wrong.

Online competitive gaming suffers a similar problem: If all your opponents are bots or cheaters, then the game is no longer fun and players leave.

The best solution we have for that is shadowbanning. When a user is found to have been cheating, only match them with other cheaters, and don't tell them. But that doesn't work in source forges where bad users can tell they can't communicate with everyone.

The next best solution is to make it expensive to be a bad actor. Make it so that to participate, you need a paid account (usually a small $5 fee). Bad actor's accounts are banned and to participate again, you need to jump through the hoops of purchasing a new account. This is used in gaming with purchasing subscriptions (where the credit card number is blacklisted), or by tying a phone number to the account which is sent a validation text message (where the number is blacklisted). This is also used by phone app stores to combat spam app submissions.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's effective.

Because they are....and Linus set it in motion by acting like LLM code slop is the way forward for linux.

First step in licence laundering

Where can I find the entire repository? Can find all the pakkages butt no "download all"

I see that there are a few people that do not like this but it seems like a reasonable contingency plan considering the way things are going. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Oh my God you people. 😂🤣

NetBSD is the most mature AI-free BSD. MirOS is a bit niche, but strictly anti-AI. HyperbolaBSD has yet to be released, but their goal is to be fully-libre, and they also are against AI. AlpineBSD is up-and-coming, and I'm watching it.

OpenBSD is pretty great. I really hope open source projects settle into a human write + LLM static review workflow but I know that's wishful thinking.

Till then OpenBSD/NetBSD

Clearly you haven't been in enough contact with AI generated code. I'm keeping track of merged or reviewd PRs in my team with race conditions or general concurrency issues. We're up to ten in 3 months (that we've noticed). Other teams are doing the same and the numbers are unnerving

Can you explain what the karma is here? I’m not familiar / don’t have the context you’re referring to

It would be cool to see something like Plan9 get attention or a modern revamp. The idea is super cool, IIRC it didn't catch on because it wasn't a compelling enough improvement on Unix for people to switch.

The Linux Foundation is the enshitification itself.

We need that new organization however I wouldn't know where to look right know: the FSF is full of libertarians. It's a miracle that they created the GPLs. And the *BSDs are even worse.

We're in a dire need of something not tainted by braindead American ideologies.