“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.
The Linux kernel is literally Linus’ project. If you don’t like it, fork it and make your own. Many have.
I’m not exactly a big supporter of AI coding tools, but as someone who works with his hands quite a lot, I can appreciate those who understands and uses these things for what they are - tools. A tool used by the right person can absolutely help a lot. But becoming dependent on a tool to build more advanced stuff, while not understanding what the code does, is where the issues start.
I mean, sure, you can use it as a stepping stone to learn the more advanced stuff, but let’s be honest, who is actually doing that? It’s certainly not gonna be those “drive by” developers, I’ll tell you that much. But do you know who does? People like Linus. Smart people who are bored by the minutia such as PRs and other automations that would have been scripted anyway.