Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Other LLM-related topics - tags, newcomers, etc

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>]

On Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:36:53 -0600
Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> wrote:

> Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org> writes:
> 
> > On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 09:09:27AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:  
> >>The use of LLMs in the development process appears to be a clear theme for
> >>the upcoming summit.  On top of what others have already suggested, I think
> >>we may want to consider these questions:
> >>
> >>- Do we want to continue naming specific LLMs in the Assisted-by tags, or
> >>  put something more generic?  I *think* that this thread:
> >>
> >>    https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260701-work-coding-assistants-v1-1-a20a94d1d606@kernel.org/
> >>
> >>  reached a consensus that "Assisted-by: LLM" was better than what we
> >>  require now, but it might be good to ratify that in this setting.  
> >
> > So originally I've added the full name of the tool and LLM because there was
> > interest in a later audit of the tools to determine how useful (or useless)
> > some of the tools are.
> >
> > If those folks aren't interested in doing so anymore, then sure - we can drop
> > it.
> >
> > But... I find it difficult to see the point of having the tag if we do that.  
> 
> Folks like Greg have, in the recent past, said that it is useful even
> without specific product-name information:
> 
>   https://lore.kernel.org/all/2026070227-payroll-eradicate-8f66@gregkh/

I never saw any merit on having such tag: it doesn't help reviewers
and doesn't provide any useful information at the git history. The
only think they eventually allow is for someone to reject a patch
without actually looking on it.

What we need to ensure is that:
1. the patch is good;
2. author carefully reviewed/modified it and not just did vibe-coding;
3. the author understands the proposed code.

Unfortunately, (2) and (3)s easily said than done as technology avances,
though.

Yet, I recently saw a patch series that sounded to be produced by vibe
coding, probably generated by some proprietary paid model. That was something 
that would very hardly be accepted by anyone, as LLM did lots of stupid
changes that are easily recognized as bad merge material. The final result was
also bad enough. So, for now, it is still easy to identify pure LLM generated
content.

> >>- There are many first-time contributors coming in with LLM-generated
> >>  patches.  At times, I could swear that every one of them is focused on
> >>  documentation typos, but the truth of the matter is that they are
> >>  reaching into subsystems all over the kernel.  We have some brand-new
> >>  contributors making significant changes to dozens of subsystems.  An
> >>  experienced developer would be hard-put to truly understand what those
> >>  changes are doing; a newcomer is unlikely to have that understanding,
> >>  and is unlikely to be around to fix eventual problems.
> >>
> >>  Our maintainers are not scaling to handle this new flood, and I fear we
> >>  are going to see some unfortunate things merged.  One LLM-driven newcomer
> >>  recently nearly succeeded in establishing himself as the maintainer of
> >>  lib/.  How do we hold the line against this stuff while remaining open to
> >>  new developers?  
> >
> > Shouldn't it be a merits question rather than a tools question?
> >
> > If the commits are correct, does it matter if they were written with
> > an LLM? 

It does if the author doesn't understand the code and can't maintain
it without LLM. The bigger issue here is actually to allow people that
doesn't know how to code himself to become a maintainer. 

> > we can insist more on supplying tests and demonstrating
> > correctness, something we seem to be doing quite rarely right now.  

Perhaps we may need to have some interaction with the developers before
letting them to become new maintainers. This may allow checking if the
guy knows what he's doing or if he is only the man-in-the-middle.

> It's definitely a merit question.  But we're not always all that good at
> determining whether a commit is correct, and we depend a lot on the
> contributor understanding their work and being around if something goes
> wrong with it.  That is part of "merit" too.  How confident are we of
> that merit when a brand-new developer makes significant changes to a
> dozen or more unrelated subsystems?

If a brand-new developer is touching lots of unrelated subsystems,
there is a high chance that it is vibe-coding.

> 
> >>- Our process is becoming increasingly dependent on proprietary tools.  We
> >>  have done that before and, in 2005, it went pretty badly for us - and
> >>  could have been worse.  How do we prepare for the inevitable rugpull?  I
> >>  raised this last year, and it was largely brushed off, but I still think
> >>  it's something we should be concerned about.  
> >
> > Are we dependent on them, or do we just find them very useful? If
> > Claude/Codex/etc goes away next month, will it stall any of our processes?
> >
> > We have AI reviews, we have many AI tools that help both authors and
> > maintainers, but I don't think that any of them play an integral part of our
> > process.  
> 
> The related discussions have featured a number of maintainers talking
> about how much time Sashiko has saved them.  I believe them.  How long
> will it take until nobody does that level of patch review anymore?  What
> will we do when the current round of corporate generosity ends and that
> tool goes away?  Maybe I'm worrying too much, but this does seem, to me,
> like a possibility we should keep in mind.

This is a serious concern. It sounds risky to rely on that, as there's
no free lunch. We need to rely on something that can be managed in
an affordable way, prioritizing models that can run on affortable GPUs
and are open source.

Thanks,
Mauro