Re: [PATCH 0/4] Add agent coding assistant configuration to Linux kernel

Theodore Ts'o
2025-07-30T19:11:13Z

On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 06:59:09PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
>
> And I absolutely will refuse to take patches from somebody who would
> consistently fail to explain why the patch is correct and needed. Sasha,
> this is the elephant in the room: we *ALREADY* get "contributions" that
> very clearly stem from "$TOOL says so, what else do you need?" kind of
> reasoning and some of that dreck ends up in the tree. AI will serve as
> a force multiplier for those... persons.
>

Any tool can be a force multipler, either for good or for ill.

For example, I suspect we have a much greater set of problems from
$TOOL's other than Large Language Models. For example people who use
"git grep strcpy" and send patches (because strcpy is eeeevil), some
of which don't even compile, and some of which are just plain wrong.
Ditto people who take a syzbot reproducer, make some change which
makes the problem go away, and then submit a patch, and only for
maintainers to point ut that the patch introduced bugs and/or really
didn't fix the problem.

I don't think that we should therefore forbid any use of patches
generated using the assistance of "git grep" or syzbot. That's
because I view this as a problem of the people using the tool, not the
tool itself. It's just that AI / LLM have been become a Boogeyman
that inspires a lot of fear and loathing.

- Ted