On Sun, 27 Sep 2026, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
On Fri, Sep 25, 2026 at 02:20:49PM +0200, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
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.
More power to them I say. There's no way to find gold in this sand. Let
them be.
Sure they are free to do whatever they want and I don't want to stop this
but I'd like to see that effort eventually improving QEMU and not lost for
us or need to be redone from scratch. So some kind of AI policy is needed
and a strict no-AI policy does not help to get these efforts defragmented.
While goal oriented use of AI tools without caring for code quality leads
to non-upstreamable patches maybe we could encourage these people to learn
and even use an AI to redo their patches in a way that can at some point
be upstreamed after some human review but since we don't have enough
maintainers who could do that for them this should be done by the
contributors. With the current no-AI policy they are locked out from
contributing so they won't even try. By now they have implemented features
we wanted for years but still could not get them due to not enough people
being able to write code and while the AI generated patches can be mostly
sand there are some gold in them that actually fixes issues or add
features that could be useful if there was a way to upstream them. With
current policy I can't even use the AI patches to look at them and clean
them up for upstreaming (not that I want to do that due to the lot of
nonsense to sift through but for some simpler patches this could be an
option or if the patches would be made higher quality by better guarding
what the AI does). Currently all I can say to these people is that QEMU
does not accept AI generated patches but maube it would be better to say
that while they cannot just submit their AI slop they should try to tell
their AIs to do these again cleaning up all the nonsense and distill the
gold from it and then there should be some way to let that improve QEMU
without drowning the maintainers and putting all this effort on them.
Regards,
BALATON Zoltan
