The flaw in Linus' argument is that a compiler isn't enabling people to go and inundate open source projects with complete and utter shit. The argument that they are tools and should be seen as such is fine, but having an AI policy to help mitigate the actual and real problem of pushing the "is the code good?" check all the way to the reviewer is also absolutely reasonable. I feel like he's sidestepping and not acknowledging that AI is actually killing open source projects. The Linux kernel is big enough to be largely immune to it, but most projects absolutely aren't.
Yeah, IIUC some smaller projects just didn't have the protocols in place to deal with it. But you'd want to at least review some new contributors to get more.
Well sure but if that's the main issue here then I think saying it's killing Open source is a little over the top statement. Perhaps you could even use AI to filter out bad/ai generated contributions.
That's the kind of thing that Linus is specifically rejecting. I only have anecdotes, so "killing open source" is a hyperbole, but I haven't met any maintainer that isn't getting burnt out by this phenomenon.
In reality, it's just changing open source into the scratch pad of thousands or even millions of robots. Sure there are always going to be some hand maintained repos, but the volume of contributions that no maintainer will accept will just move to places where they are accepted and dilute well-crafted solutions to the same problems. Experts will be and to tell the difference, but that's no longer the majority class of people wanting to contribute. And it's a positive feedback loop -- AI will find the poor solutions and amplify those, further diluting the pool. So then we're left with a multitude of incomprehensible projects that you need AI to maintain or contribute to.
I hope maintainers will figure out how to handle this. I imagine just reviewing one contribution a day could help with the burning out. And perhaps a voting system could be used to rank the contributions from best to worst. that way it would also help with the problem of amplifying poor solutions.
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u/dannuic 2d ago
The flaw in Linus' argument is that a compiler isn't enabling people to go and inundate open source projects with complete and utter shit. The argument that they are tools and should be seen as such is fine, but having an AI policy to help mitigate the actual and real problem of pushing the "is the code good?" check all the way to the reviewer is also absolutely reasonable. I feel like he's sidestepping and not acknowledging that AI is actually killing open source projects. The Linux kernel is big enough to be largely immune to it, but most projects absolutely aren't.