Not directly related to this patch but as an input to this discussion I'd
like to bring to your attention how some people use AI now. With LLMs
being able to do more, some users who have no idea about coding or QEMU
internals but want to use QEMU for things that we could not deliver, now
just maintain a fork and let the AI add features and fix bugs they find
without ever contacting us or reporting these back. They now talk to the
AI instead of us because they get faster results and achieve what they
couldn't if they just waited for us to fix these issues or add the needed
features. I've briefly looked at one such repo and the patches the AI
makes are mostly nonsense but they also contain some actual fixes which at
the end is good enough for these users as long as the result does what
they want. But this could not be upstreamed by them anyway so they also
don't intend to do that. This is not ideal and a strict no-AI policy leads
to this practice becoming more common (although a less strict policy will
also not stop this if the AI is faster to deliver what they need).
Therefore I think we should allow some AI assisted contributions but we
have to put a limit on the minimum quality and requiring that people who
do such contributions have some idea of what they are doing and don't just
flood the project with nonsense patches tries to do that. The proposal to
require the human to review and describe the patches, sign the DCO (as a
proof they did review the patch and know what's in it) and participate in
review seems to be a good middle ground to protect the maintainers from
slop but also not lock out people who can't do everything by themselves
but could still make useful contribution with AI help.
Alternatively if we worry more about copyright the AI contributions could
be restricted to bug fixes that are not rewriting large parts of the code
and often are just a few lines that would not be copyrightable anyway.
That still locks out new features added with AI help but at least we get
notified about bugs they already fixed with AI even if at the end we
decide to fix the bug in a different way. Maybe people would not even
submit such patches if they can't just tell the AI to do it and they have
to do it by hand but we can't lift that limitation without getting too
much slop at this point.
All the above may resolve in a few years when these tools won't be freely
available any more but some people are already paying for this so maybe it
will stay that way and the "official" QEMU will just become one fork
between the many AI managed ones.
Regards,
BALATON Zoltan
