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jesus christ… it’s been said over a million times, the development of the linux kernel is not some fucking 5 star github repo. it goes through a shit ton of review, it’s seen by a lot of eyes. a small piece of text that says it was assisted or not by ai is irrelevant if the code is good or not, which is the work of maintainers to decide.
On the contrary, a small piece of text that says “this code deserves more review because humans may not have seen it” is absolutely necessary.
All this is doing is making it so I can hide that I didn’t touch the code.
On the contrary, a small piece of text that says “this code deserves more review because humans may not have seen it” is absolutely necessary.
All this is doing is making it so I can hide that I didn’t touch the code.
Why are you assuming that everyone would honestly disclose AI use if it was a rule?
The honest ones that would disclose it to say “this needs more eyes, guys” can still do just that. The dishonest ones that would hide AI use will do exactly that whether it’s a rule or not.
The only difference here is there’s no punitive action to follow for non-disclosure because that would be a gigantic waste of time when, AI or not, all code needs to be reviewed anyway.
I have to say the same thing I said to the other commenter; I’m really not sure that “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
I have to say the same thing I said to the other commenter; I’m really not sure that “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
Nice attempt at spin but relies too much on readers having room temperature IQ to believe that’s what my argument is. And just to be clear, by ‘Nice attempt’ I’m being sarcastic.
What kind of psycopath quotes the entire comment they’re replying to? As if your opinions weren’t enough of a red flag.
Do you have an actual counter to my original argument or are you just going to throw vague insults at anyone who disagrees with you like everywhere else you’ve commented in this post?
As time goes by, you just learn to understand that some people are just not worth your time.
Also, you did not disagree with me because you didn’t reply to any comment of mine. Oh, and there was nothing vague about the insult.
Cheers.
What kind of psycopath quotes the entire comment they’re replying to? As if your opinions weren’t enough of a red flag.
i think you’re being a little rude.
because there is no guarantee the code will be wrong per se. should junior developers need to disclose this fact, then? because according to your logic their code could be wrong! furthermore, there’s the fact people will do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of you raging on an internet forum about disclosure. people might not even read that shit because they don’t give a fuck. so you end up with half assed policy which you cannot enforce. job well done, let’s go home boys.
Junior developers’ code always goes through more review, yes. Also, I’m not sure “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
no, people who have never contributed to the linux kernel are “flagged” simply because maintainers have never seen this person, but there’s no “junior developer disclosure policy”. you could be a senior dev who simply is contributing for their first time. you could be receiving ai assisted code by very old contributors, for example, which in the eyes of the maintainers is a certain feeling of trust precisely because that person has a history with the project. i think your comprehension skills are poor, since that’s not what i said. my argument is that a policy that cannot be enforced and as argumented also provide very little gain, is not doing much at all. if a policy does nothing, what is the purpose of this policy?
In their eyes it does something though it gives them something to rage about.
So then the person who doesn’t put that in, doesn’t get reviewed. Are you dumb enough to think everyone well follow the rules?
For the third time; “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is not the argument you think it is.
They why try to hide it? If AI is not problematic at all, why do 90% of AI bros hide it and refuse to disclose and when they do are often extremely cagey about it?
For these types of projects, it is standardized what compiler they are building against, kernel /proc allows you to see what compiler was used.
Why does AI, which Linus himself has compared to compilers numerous times, get a complete pass and absolutely nothing has to be specified about them whatsoever (in the anti-AI-Disclosure advocation space of course)?
i have seen the complete opposite, just because some post doesnt start with THIS WAS DONE BY AI doesn’t mean someone’s trying to hide it. i recently saw a post where they shared the repo, you could clearly see claude as a contributor in the repo and many of the commits were done by it. but apparently they were trying to hide it. these kinds of complaints sound that came from people who have never used git, let alone touch a single line of code.
the comparison is not correct. a compiler is deterministic, asking about it is asking about a standardized tool. ai is stochastic, asking about it does not guarantee reproducibility, which is the whole point, not suspicion about if the compiler did or did not translated it properly into machine code. furthermore, precisely since ai is stochastic, even if you knew which model and version you used, you’d get different results, which needs review anyway.
Eh, I see every 4th project post in open source communities being a cool looking project with no Claude contributed, no AI disclaimer, no agents.md, however when you look at the user’s commit history on the git service, it is
- 10-20 contributions (mostly issues) before 2025
- maybe a couple readme or documentation commits in total
- mid to late 2025, user starts committing 500-5k lines per day, every 3-5 days, evolving from large commits to broken up 100 commits today (following the 2025-2026 timeline where AI started doing the same)
- exact same commit structure that AI uses, and filled with jargon
- no comments at all on the post, or few comments but never responding to anything technical about how the program works.
Probably some confirmation bias going on on both our sides.
90% of AI bros hide it and refuse to disclose and when they do are often extremely cagey about it
source?
The coder doesn’t disclose what compiler he tested against. Doesn’t say what OS they where using or programs.
but why remove it ?
Because rules have to be enforced, and investing time and effort into detecting and punishing rule-breakers would be a pointless endeavor when, disclosure/AI or not, all code has to be reviewed anyway.
According to Linus it’s free advertising for the AI companies (wowe look at how much code Claude (partially) committed buy le Anthropic now!) and also people don’t disclose all their other tools either so this is just an exception which can be removed. And I bet there’s going to be a ton of LLM based reviewing on all code that’s submitted to double check for potential bugs anyway.
Anyone who is allowed to work in the Linux kernel isn’t going to (be allowed to) push random slop.
Yeah, at this point I think it’s somewhat of a useless distraction. They do the validation work to prevent any problems from it, but an immense amount of drama seems to arise every time the topic comes up, and I’m sure Anthropic (and many insufferable AI bros) have been crowing to high heaven that Linus Torvalds uses it.
They’ve clearly chosen to allow it at the highest level for anyone competent enough to validate the work and stand by it. Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT won’t be answering reviewer questions about the implementation, that’s up to the human standing by the work, so they only need to know about the human, from a practical perspective.
maybe we should ask the maintainers, since it’s they’re the ones where this disclaimer could be useful or not. :)
Because it’s literally advertising for LLM companies. Because certain news sites conclude from it that “AI did $thing” instead of “engineer did $thing, using whatever tools they found useful”. Because you can’t actually enforce it, which makes the tag completely useless.
Any of these reasons is good enough on its own.
It’s seen by a lot of eyes
Wonder how long before the code review is also offloaded to AI and Linux kernel becomes a black box with not even Linus himself knowing well enough how it works and what it does.
thank you for telling me how little you understand about the topic.
That’s an amount of speculation that is completely unnecessary at this stage.
But that doesn’t matter! Join the crusade!! AI is either the devil incarnate or our lord and savior! No in-between (no sanity in particular) allowed.
And as long as you have still not gone insane and argue rationally the bombardment of at least one pro-, one anti-AI post/article about Linux per day has to continue…
i feel you, i honestly been feeling the need to avoid the linux community (although i’ve obviously failed) for some time because is tiring.
tiring
Hate to tell you this but that’s probably a core feature here.
Someone was trying to argue here that code is less about what it actually does and more about the feelings that drove them (as distinct from thought processes or motivating logic behind them) and since AI betrays this, must AI disclosure blah blah!!!
Once arguments have entered the realm of absurdity and legitimate discourse is overshadowed by bad faith discussions of shifting goalposts and gish gallops, the only question that remains is who stands to gain the most from the english speaking world being slow to adopt AI.
Once reasonable heads have left the room and decline to discuss any topic on AI (because they expect the toxic environment devoid of reason), only agenda driven collectives and a handful of their useful idiots will steer future discourse.
There’s something darkly enjoyable about seeing a comment that urges both sides of the argument to see reason get downvoted into oblivion.
I agree with you, though. For 4 years now, we have perpetually been 90 days from both the AI bubble collapsing and AI stealing all of our jobs. AI is just a tool. Can you do horrible things with it? Yep. Can you do wonderful things with it? Also yep.
Literally every argument you can make for/against it has an equal and opposite argument that can be made that counters what you said.
ai is owned and marketed by completely evil people.
Ah yes, because anthropic, openai and whatnot own the very concept, the principles behind modern llm and transformer models.
I’m not talking about starscream
who?
For 4 years now, we have perpetually been 90 days from both the AI bubble collapsing and AI stealing all of our jobs.
Also: AGI soon™
downvoted into oblivion.
It has - 4 downvotes. Chill.
Can you do wonderful things with it?
You can do wonderful things with the stealing machine? Oh goodie.
It’s funny when people arguing for open source, copyleft and how copyright should not exist at all suddenly complain that AI is trained on stolen copyrighted data…
Especially if that isn’t even the problem. That AI canin fact rarely do wonderful things and just creates slop most of the time would have been an actual argument. But as lobbyists directing this fake mud fight write the arguments for both sides copyrights and “stealing of precious IPs” is suddenly –somehow– a valid complain in open source communities that would loudly scream about the opposite any other day of the week.
I literally never said any of those things. Do you want to engage with people or just have fictional discussions in your own echo chamber?
Also, forking a repo or using someone’s library without any momey exchanging hands is pretty different from using a glorified psychophantic prediction model that spits out results (for which it does charge money, mind you) for you to turn around and go “I made dis”. All of this while you can’t buy anything anymore and the bubble grows and grows. It’s like the “this is fine” meme, but you just can’t see the fire and you actually believe that everything is fine.
Yeah, I will totally go and say, “Look at that wonderful sloppy slop I made” while praising an insane bubble kept alive by 24/7 propaganda fairy tales.
Oh wait… no I won’t. And actually criticised that bullshit and the fake discussion directed by idiot tech-bros to keep the hype alive. Those lines you try to put into my mouth seem to belong to some idiot in your “fictional discussion in your own echo chamber”.
Except that you didn’t say any of that in this specific thread? Should I have read your mind? I also never said that you thought AI was great. I simply criticized the technology and that struck a nerve, apparently.
You’re a bit on edge buddy, relax.
I literally never said any of those things. Do you want to engage with people or just have fictional discussions in your own echo chamber?
Also, are we forgetting that AI models were trained by stealing from a fuckton of people? How are folks ok with this? Why is the discussion solely about how well the models work? Where is everyone’s moral compass?
Also considering how often you miss the mark with it, maybe look up what psychopath actually means…
They said I “argued for” open source, copyleft and how copyright should not exist at all. I literally never said any of that.
I’m done dude. If you want to keep spiraling, be my guest. Good job on the quoting stuff though. Your kinda getting the hang of it.
this is mind blowing to me, i have never seen open source people be so invested in promoting copyrights.
I don’t understand. Being moral is irrelevant?
yes, the Linux kernel would probably accept patches from Al Qaeda if it was a good patch and they were allowed to by most governments.
Can we as the tech community stop dick riding Linus and accept that he sold out to big tech?
100%, just don’t worship anyone and have some personality / spine.
Can we as the tech community
Do you talk about everyone in the tech involved? That’s hardly a single community under one umbrella. You ask everyone using any tech to believe what you want to, by just asking them to.
stop dick riding Linus
Whatever that even means to you. No one of rides on Linus’ dick.
accept that he sold out to big tech
He didn’t sold out to big tech.
Linus explained multiple times that he just uses Ai to help him and their maintainers. Everyone involved still need to understand the code.
Does not matter how he uses AI. It is a fundamentally unethical technology. Environmental damage, job losses, stealing work from open source programmers and artists, poisoning the young generations mind etc.
I don’t give a fuck how Linus uses AI. Linux was here before LLMs were a thing and it can continue to be like this. Linus chose the easy way and disregarded every single negative aspect of it and decided to call it 'just a tool". The exact same excuse every single cuckcoder uses btw.
Does not matter how he uses AI.
It matters a lot.
It is a fundamentally unethical technology. Environmental damage, job losses, stealing work from open source programmers and artists, poisoning the young generations mind etc.
Agreed.
I don’t give a fuck how Linus uses AI.
Doesn’t matter what you give a fuck.
Linux was here before LLMs were a thing and it can continue to be like this.
Linux was much different back then and changed multiple times over the course of its existence.
Linus chose the easy way and disregarded every single negative aspect of it and decided to call it 'just a tool".
I do not believe that Linus disregarded every single negative aspect. He still expresses his issues with it if there are. Linus was always pragmatic and practical thinking. From his perspective it is just a tool, like a compiler is.
The exact same excuse every single cuckcoder uses btw.
What is a cuckcoder? (I start thinking with your language and choice of words in both replies, that you have a dick problem.)
no it is not fundamentally unethical. Please stop perpetuating this stupid take. AI is not designed to do unethical things. The profit motive drives companies to doing unethical things with it. If it weren’t for AI, they’d use something else.
Please don’t lose sight of the root cause of the problems, which is profit above everything. Equally you could say that fossil fuel combustion engines are fundamentally unethical because they cause climate change and all sorts of health issues.
Most technologies are neither ethical nor unethical. It is how you use them and what for that might be ethical or unethical. Sure they can be more or less useful. We can argue about that. But technology itself is orthogonal to ethics. Unless it is nukes or anything that is explicitly designed to do harm and nothing else.
poisoning the young generations mind
literal cult behaviour, lol
I find this exceptionally upsetting.
This decision baffles me.
As some one here summarised it: it is to stop AI companies from getting free advertisement and endorsement, the kernel itself goes through an unbelievable amount of scrutiny so the disclosure requirement was irrelevant
Has anyone thought about what AI code does to the license of each file it’s used in?
If AI code can’t be copyrighted does it also follow that it can’t be protected by copyleft rules?
Do I have to make ai source available when I reuse some part of it in my project?
This should be a real concern for commercial software, maybe not Linux, but all the vibe coding game studios should lose copyrights on things that AI codes.
I guess, as he suggested, it’s time to fork it.
the hardest part is to come pu with a good project name and mascot.
I’ll say we go the opposite of a penguin - a polar bear. And then go the way of Open Office and call it Librux.
I’m sure that will catch on
- Snoorlox
- Iguana
If the use and inclusion of LLM derived output is truly defensible, why would you need to conceal its provenance or existence?
The debasement and solvency of competency wrought by the unbridled abdication to responsibility to such an incompetent construct is beyond depressing, this Is truly a world no longer worth inhabiting.
The question is why it matters in the first place. As long as the person submitting code takes ownership of the code, and there is a review of the code being done the same as before, nothing actually changes. Your whole line of argument is absurd because it’s premised on the idea that we can trust code produced by a human more than code produced by an LLM. And that’s obviously not true because humans make mistakes all the time. So, the focus on how the code was produced is fundamentally misguided. The focus in any successful project is on validation through things like code reviews, specifications, testing, and other well established practices. That’s what responsible teams have always done.
To me, it matters because the use and reliance on LLMs demonstrably erodes cognitive capacity and ability, and submissions tainted by them should be subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny, which can only be facilitated with a consummate element of transparency. That elevated scrutiny could, and probably should, also be applied to non-LLM infected submissions, but doing so wouldn’t negate the labelling of authorship.
Good faith proponents of LLM assisted tooling should be in favour of overt transparency and labelling, as it’s a requirement to facilitate future historical analysis of their utility, efficacy, and legitimacy; you know, to build a body of evidence.
I assume you’re citing a couple of studies with tiny samples that have been going around here. There’s very little solid evidence to support the claim that LLMs demonstrably erode cognitive capacity. But if you have large scale, peer reviewed studies definitively showing this to be the case feel free to share them.
People lose certain skills working with LLMs, but that has always been the case with automation. Very few people know how to write assembly by hand, and practically nobody knows how to operate punch cards. Yet, we hardly claim that there was some loss of cognitive capacity as a result. People just spend their time focusing on different things now.
And I’ve already explained to you why the focus on the tooling is deeply misguided. You ignored my points entirely, which tells me that you’re not actually trying to have a discussion in good faith here yourself.
To me it matters because if you got code from someone else, you’d probably want to credit it to them, right? So why shouldn’t LLM output be treated the same?
LLM is a tool that a human uses, do you also credit your IDE when you write code?
My IDE does not write the code for me, at most it autocompletes words.
The LLM works on the exact same principle as autocomplete does. You’re just drawing an arbitrary line on technology you’re used to.
Anyone who believes, and confidently espouses, that the autocomplete from the dictionary included in an IDE is functionally indistinguishable from the function and output of a LLM, is betraying a foundational lack of understanding of either. The former is constrained and deterministic, whereas the latter is explosively imprecise and intrinsically unreliable.
You keep invoking the notion that LLMs are merely tools, and should be treated as mindless subservient instruments deployed by a programmer in command. The thing, however, with tools is they can often trivially become weapons if wielded with incendiary intent, or indiscriminate instruments of destruction under the direction of incompetence.
Skill is acquired through use over time. LLMs are far too new for anyone to have legitimately accrued enough experience which could be mistaken for competence. With this in mind, anyone claiming to know what they, or the model they’re poking with a prompt, are doing, is a charlatan.
Anyone who makes lazy straw man arguments is betraying utter lack of intellectual integrity. Nowhere did I say their output is indistinguishable, what I actually said is that they work on the same principles. These are both stochastic systems.
The LLMs are very obviously mere tools that are instruments programmers use. Every tool can be wielded as a weapon, there’s nothing unique about LLMs in this regard. I also have no idea what this has to do with AI use disclosure which is the context for this thread.
How LLMs work is well understood, and that’s a completely different subject from how to use them effectively as a skill. With this in mind, the person who can’t even make a coherent argument, and keeps conflating unrelated things, is the actual charlatan here.
True in some regards, however the word completion in my IDE is only active when I’m typing new code in, it only picks words that already exist in the code (along with language specific keywords, etc). It never types the following word for me, and I have to manually accept the completion I want. It is inactive when I’m typing comments in, and so on.
The LLM you tell to write you a function, and it writes the whole thing, comments and all. It’s not quite the same. The original GitHub Copilot was closest to traditional IDE completion though, and there if it wrote a whole long function for me I’d definitely give credit where it’s due.
It’s a different workflow, but all LLM does is just more automation. The intention and the ideas still come from the developer, just because the tool automates the work of typing out code doesn’t really change anything. Nobody who’s done any serious software development thinks that typing code is the important part of coding.
Who said anything about concealing it? Not making a disclaimer mandatory and concealing something are two different things.
From the point of view of a reviewer, the code of the PR is all that matters. You shouldn’t look at who wrote the code or what tools they used.
If the code is slop, it does not matter that a human or an AI wrote it, it is slop. Same if the code does what it’s supposed to do and has a high enough quality to pass review.
Good
Atleast NT is not vibecoded yet, not sure about BSD.
NT is definitely vibecoded at this point. Not like we can check anyway.
NetBSD has a clear stance on no ai.
As much as NetBSD takes a stand against AI, it’s not banned. They just said AI code has to be signed off by the core team.
LLM code can be committed with “written approval by core.” https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html#%3A~%3Atext=written+approval
Also Haiku OS and Ironclad OS
If NT is refering to the windows kernal then I got bad news for ya
The userspace is 30% vibecoded as the world has seen with w11 on a daily basis jajaja.
NT isn’t open source too. So nobody cares about NT.
It would be interesting if this results in Linux being forked or perhaps even more interesting developers and users opposed to AI moving to GNU Hurd or any of the BSD variants.
good luck with that. software development has changed and it will never be the same. you will not be able to achieve the level of security required without ai assistance, you can’t beat a machine. and this is something you’ll see everywhere and is the tip of exponential curve.
I feel like we are moving into the acceptance phase.
The code, or parts of the code, may not be under copyright, but why does that matter? I suppose in the rare cases when it leaks we could freely use the AI generated parts of it, but how do you untangle the AI stuff from the human written stuff? It’s a minefield for a for-profit company. And for the open source community it doesn’t really matter since AI can reverse engineer pretty much any game now and generate copyright free code from it.
