“Torvalds said that the time has come to make it harder for new people to contribute code to the kernel. People like Kroah-Hartman have spent years trying to teach people how to contribute; it is time to stop doing that, he said.”
https://lwn.net/Articles/1099594/
It is difficult to summarize exactly how Linus got to this point. Most of the discussion at this years Summit appears to have been related to AI assisted code and how the maintainers are dealing with the increase in code submissions to LKML. Many of the maintainers expressed varying levels of frustration with AI assisted drive-by code submissions. Linus’ train of thought is that they make it intentionally more difficult for humans to contribute. A later suggestion of his was to create an AGENTS. md that makes generating kernel code expensive in compute and token time.
He’s not perfect, obviously, he’s had some notable issues in the past. I think he’s a victim of his own optimism here.
I think he genuinely didn’t believe so many people would just vibe code slop and spam maintainers with it.
It’s kinda the classic, “I’ve always used XYZ responsibly and never had a problem. Doesn’t everybody else do that?” People do this all the time with credit cards, alcohol, gambling, extreme sports, etc. You think that because you’ve always done it “the right/smart/responsible way” it must be equally as obvious to everyone.
this actually gets me with the bootstraps people. Its like do you know people at all. We need a society where those folks who blow their paycheck right after getting it can still contribute. Whenever people think about people they should think about everyone in their high school. Not who they hung with. Everybody.