On Tue, Oct 13, 2026 at 07:32:40PM +0200, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > > Yes there will be collateral damage, but it's that or no more open source > > (we're > > not the only ones going through this!) > > Think how you will feel the day you will be treated as collateral > damage.
I'm already working evenings and weekends to deal with AI slop to the point of burnout (finished work at 9pm last night, for instance), so I already feel like I'm collateral damage. And it's utterly thankless work. You get negativity no matter what you do with this stuff. I accept all that, I do it because I care. So you take it on the chin. But the AI slop wave has changed everything. What was already an unsustainable review load has now doubled, or tripled, and there's every reason to believe it's only the beginning. So now maintainership and review is thankless at an unprecedented scale, which leads to only one thing - burnout. Possibly even the medical variety, where you don't come back for a long while, if ever. The project simply cannot function like this, it can't. And nothing that requires per-submitter effort scales. There are people sending 500 patches in 2 hours already, for instance. The only solution that can possibly work is large-scale ignoring, because the number of submissions can grow exponentially, and even small effort-per-submission is vastly beyond available resource. The alternative is maintainers quitting en masse and the project dies at that point. So it's a choice between two bad options, but one of them is 'linux dies'. So the other one seems better. > > I find this mail thread it taking an almost cynical and violent turn. > Are people rejoicing at the prospect of actively discriminating against > sincere contributors, or am I misreading it ? The kernel community needs > more care. You're misreading it. I feel _terrible_ for newcomers. Really. It hurts me that this situation exists. I came up as a hobbyist from nowhere. I wrote a book thinking nobody would care, part-time, while doing a busy non-kernel job. And the kernel being what it is let me get where I am, for which I'm eternally grateful. I want to encourage talented newcomers. They are rare, and are the future of the kernel. I explicitly spent time at LPC encouraging newer people, in person, for instance. I have (often behind the scenes) encouraged young, talented developers. So in general, I've _actively_ worked on this. And new people sending small, sensible, non-slopped patches/series will still most likely get their stuff merged in mm. So it's very far from the case of 'oh wow now I can just ignore everybody'. -- Cheers, Lorenzo
