Re: [PATCH 1/4] docs/devel: relax policy on AI-generated contributions

["Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst@redhat.com>]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2026 at 12:03:39PM +0200, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
> 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.

No one has the time and energy to wade through mountains of slop. 


> So some kind of AI policy is needed
> and a strict no-AI policy does not help to get these efforts defragmented.

There's no effort here.

> 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

AI's can not do this, at this juncture.

-- 
MST