> Op 13-10-2026 23:23 EDT schreef Theodore Tso <[email protected]>: > > > This isn't actually a new problem. In the pre-AI era, we would > sometimes get marginal patches, and there is always a question of > whether it is the maintainer's time to try to engage with a new > contributor who might turn into the next valued senior contributor and > reviewer --- or who might be resistant to education and/or who might > disappear very shortly. AI makes the problem worse in that there are > many more newcomers with new contributions, but it's really not a new > problem.
This is aligned to the point that I was trying to make, and I believe you it is not a new problem: how do you identify these "next valued seniors"? What pipelines/processes does the kernel community have to identify and grow these people? Just showing up regularly on the list is becoming a less clear signal because of LLMs. Not because no useful contributions can come from them, but because a growing part of new contributors is of the drive-by variety. Jon recently outlined a case of someone submitting dozens of patches in a single day. Obviously this person is never going to be a core kernel developer, and the tool we have now (explicitly) is to ignore/deprioritize them. Zig took the approach to just disallow LLM contributions, Linux is explicitly not going down that road. This hopefully tackles the burn-out part of the equation, but it does not per se address the pipeline problem. I suggested maybe it could be addressed by simply seeing people at conferences (and I have a hard time understanding how one could grow into a senior without going to any ever). I imagine this more or less has always been the case anyway. It works the same way in academia, or really any field, if people don't know you, you likely won't get your paper published, savant or not. There was a time when kernel programming was fairly unapproachable, so that just the fact of submitting a patch was a signal of commitment or at least effort (and as you said, not even then always). That time is no more. Yes, Hardy would have missed Ramanujan now maybe. But we also have the kernel mentorship program, and the community can think about other ways as well. As a senior kernel programmer, do you have any suggestions for this? I would be really interested in your take, Best, Jori.
