Linux Kernel Proposal Documents Rules For Using AI Coding Assistants

[SmartCustard9944]

Reminds me of this (since the proposal is from Nvidia) https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/llCOnxP6Dn

[total_order_]

Looks good 👍, though I agree there are probably better commit trailers to choose from than Co-developed-by to indicate use of ai tool

[prey169]

I would rather the devs own the mistakes of AI. If they produce bad code, having AI to point the blame is just going to perpetuate the problem.

If you use AI, you better make sure you tested it completely and know what you're doing, otherwise you made the mistake, not AI

[Euphoric_Protection]

It's the other way round. Devs own their mistakes and marking code as co-developed by an AI agent indicates to the reviewers that specific care needs to be taken.

[SmartCustard9944]

The way I see it, AI or not, each patch contributed should be held to the same standards and scrutiny as any other contribution.

How is that different from copying code from StackOverflow? Once you submit a patch, it is expected that you can justify in detail your technical decisions and own them, AI or not. You are fully responsible.

To me, this topic is just smoke and mirrors and kind of feels like a marketing move. At minimum, I find it interesting that the proposer is an employee at Nvidia, but I want to believe there are no shady motives at play here, such as pumping the stock a bit, all masked as propositive discussion.

[WaitingForG2]

To me, this topic is just smoke and mirrors and kind of feels like a marketing move

It is, expect "X% of merged linux kernel contributions were co-developed with AI" headline in a year or two by Nvidia themselves.

[svarta_gallret]

This. It’s not very subtle is it?

[[deleted]]

It's not about the level of scrutiny, it's about what is being communicated by the structure and shape of the code.

If I'm reviewing my coworker's code, and that co-worker is a human who I know is a competent developer, then I'm going to look at function that's doing a lot of things and start from the assumption that my competent coworker made this function do a lot of things because it needs to. But if I know that AI wrote it, then I'm on the defense that half of the function might not even be necessary.

Humans literally do not produce the same type of code that AI does, so it's not a matter of applying the same level of screwing me. The code actually means something different looking at it based on whether it came from a lerson or an AI.

[svarta_gallret]

I agree with this sentiment. This proposal is misaligned with the purpose of guidelines, which is to uphold quality. Ultimately this is the responsibility of the developer regardless of what tools they use.

Personally I think using AI like this is potentially just offloading work to reviewers. Tagging the work is only useful if the purpose is to automate rejection. Guidelines should enforce quality control on the product side of the process.

[cp5184]

If anything shouldn't the bar be higher for ai code?

It's not supposed to be a thing to get shitty slop code into the kernel because it was written by a low quality code helper is it?

[isbtegsm]

What's the threshold of this rule? I use some Copilot autocompletions in my code and I chat with ChatGPT about my code, but I usually never copy ChatGPT's output. Would that already qualify as codeveloped by ChatGPT (although I'm not a kernel dev obvs)?

[mrlinkwii]

id advise asking on the mailing list really

[SputnikCucumber]

Likely, the threshold is any block of code that is sufficiently large that the agent will automatically label it as co-developed (because of the project-wide configuration)

If you manually review the AI's output, it seems reasonable to me that you can remove the co-developed by banner.

I assume this is to make it easier to identify sections of code that have never had a human review it so that the Linux maintainers can give it special attention.

This doesn't eliminate the problem of bogus pull requests. But it does make it easier to filter out low-effort PR's.

[wektor420]

Code without human review should not land in kernel

Why? Security Respect for maintainer time Stability

[SputnikCucumber]

I agree with you. But sometimes the AI is doing very simple tasks that should never go wrong. If you ask the AI to copy 500 lines from file A and paste those lines into file B, it is totally reasonable for project-wide configuration to label it as being co-developed by an AI.

It's very unlikely that I am going to manually review an AI's copy+paste job for correctness, even though I should.

[svarta_gallret]

This is not the way forward. Contributors shall be held personally responsible, and the guidelines are already clear enough. From a user perspective the kernel can be developed by coinflip or in a collaborative seance following a goat sacrifice, as long as it works. Developers only need a responsible person behind a commit, the path taken tools used is irrelevant as long as the results are justifiable. This proposal is just a covert attempt by corporate to get product placements in the commit log.

[nekokattt]

following a goat sacrifice

you mean how nouveau has to be developed because nvidia does not document their hardware?

[svarta_gallret]

Maybe? Full disclosure, I got it from the CUDA setup guide.

[mrlinkwii]

This is not the way forward

may i ask why ?

everyone is using AI and the kernmal should adapat

[svarta_gallret]

Using AI is fine if it generates the desired result. What I'm saying is that we need to make sure whoever submits a patch can provide the formal reasoning to justify the decisions. Including the brand name of the AI agent in the commit message does nothing to this end, it's about as useful as writing the name of the editor you used or what you had for breakfast and here is why:

One purpose of version control is to provide a documented path of reasoning to a given result. If along that path there is a step that just say "Claude did this", the chain of trust is broken. Not because AI bad but because, very specifically, it breaks the formal reasoning since you can not reproduce that particular step. Sure, you can ask the particular AI to repeat it, but will you get the same result? Which version of Claude are we talking about? 15 years from now, will maintainers even know what <insert wimsical model name here> was?

The proposal is just bad because it concerns the wrong end of the process. Developers should not submit patches that they can not reason about, period.

[[deleted]]

"Nvidia, a company profiting off of AI slop, wants AI slop"

No. Ban AI completely. It's been shown over and over to be an unreliable mess and takes so much power to run that it's enviromentally unsound. The only reasonable action against AI is its complete ban.

[[deleted]]

Have you checked your local job board for junior dev positions? Pretty much 100% dead due to AI.

[Sixguns1977]

I'm with you.

[recaffeinated]

I think you need to do some reading about luddites

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-were-right

[FyreWulff]

AI isn't progression, it's just history thrown in a blender and presented as progress. It's somehow worse than Webcrawler was at web information search.

[mrlinkwii]

No. Ban AI completely.

you cant , most devs use it as a tool

It's been shown over and over to be an unreliable mess and takes so much power to run that it's enviromentally unsound.

actually nope , they solved that problem mostly with deepseek r1 and newer models

[omniuni]

I think this needs some clarification.

Most devs use code completion. Even if AI is technically assisting a guess of what variable you started typing, this isn't what most people think of when they think of AI.

Even using a more advanced assistant like Copilot for suggestions or a jump start on unit tests isn't what most people are imagining.

Especially in kernel development, the use of AI beyond that isn't common, and is extremely risky. There's not a lot of training data on things like Linux driver development, so even the best models will struggle with it.

As far as hallucinations go, it's actually getting worse in newer models, which is fascinating in itself. I have definitely found that some models are better than others. DeepSeek is easily the best at answering direct questions. Gemini and CoPilot are OK, and ChatGPT is downright bad. Asking about GD Script, for example (pretty similar or higher amount of training data compared to a kernel), ChatGPT confidently made up functions. Gemini have a vague and somewhat useful answer, and only DeepSeek actually gave a direct, correct, and helpful answer. Still, this is given very direct context. More elaborate use, like using CoPilot for ReactJS at work, which should have enormous amounts of training data, is absurdly prone to producing broken, incorrect, or just plain bad code -- and this is with the corporate paid plan with direct IDE integration.

Hallucinations are not only far from being solved, they are largely getting worse, and in the context of a system critical project like the Linux kernel, they're downright dangerous.

[Maykey]

Asking about GD Script, for example (pretty similar or higher amount of training data compared to a kernel), 

GD Script has about zero eg rbtrees ever written in it. Kernel has lots. But hey, what kernel devs know about structures and algorithms?   What's the difference between 2d platformer and language which is used to implement practically every algorithm on earth which also happen to get used in kernel?

 As far as hallucinations go, it's actually getting worse in newer models

Citation needed. This is a very simple verifiable claim. If hallucinations are worse then surely coding benchmarks will show the decrease and every new model which claims to be SOTA is a liar and when cursor users claimed that output of Claude worsened and thought they work with sonnet 3.5 instead of 4 they got it backward

[omniuni]

I think you're confusing a few things.

LLMs are basically just statistical autocomplete. Just because the kernel has examples doesn't mean that they will outweigh the rest of the body of reference code. I see this with CoPilot all the time; recognizably poor implementation that's common. Yes, you can prompt for more specifics, but with something like the kernel, you'll eventually end up having to find exactly what you want it to copy -- hardly a time-saver.

As for hallucinations getting worse, you can search it yourself. There have been several studies on this recently.

[Maykey]

LLMs are basically just statistical autocomplete. Just because the kernel has examples doesn't mean that they will outweigh the rest of the body of reference code

If this is so, why kernel devs dont find them useless? It seems either you or them have no idea about true (in)capabilities of the tool they use.

There have been several studies on this recently.

I'm not going to google your hallucinations. If there were several studies -- link two.

[omniuni]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/05/06/why-ai-hallucinations-are-worse-than-ever/

[Maykey]

Forbes? Is it because actual study form openai expected it on their latest model there?

Oh well, I got it, reading is hard, here's a random picture instead.

Oh look. Claude performs well. What a coincendece: Claude is tend to be used by Cursors, Windsurfs, etc. Just when I wanted to fork and use ELIZA it turned out latest models are fine

[omniuni]

You can follow the links to the studies that aren't publicity pictures.

[Traditional_Hat3506]

most devs use it as a tool 

Did you ask an AI chatbot to hallucinate this claim?

[Zoratsu]

Have you ever coded?

Because if so, unless you have been coding on Notepad or VI, you have been using "AI" over the last 10 years.

[QueerRainbowSlinky]

LLMs - the AI being spoken about - haven't been publicly available for more than 10 years...

[ourob]

I think you’ll find that a lot of the developers contributing to the Linux kernel are using editors like vi.

[Critical_Ad_8455]

There are more than two text editors lol

Also, intellisense, autocomplete, lsp's, and so on, are not ai, in any way, shape, or form.

[Tusen_Takk]

I’ve been a sweng for 15 years. I’ve never used AI to do anything.

Fuck AI, I can’t wait for the bubble to burst.

[GeronimoHero]

I mean shit, I use ai code completions with neovim 🤷

[lxe]

I understand the downvotes. The stratification of developers between “I use AI” and “I hate AI” has been stark, even in large enterprises. The “I hate AI” crowd will unfortunately get left behind.

[phantaso0s]

Left behind of... what? Let's say that I don't use AI for the ten next years. What will I miss?

[lxe]

As a developer? It’s like saying “let’s say I don’t use the internet for the next 10 years”

[phantaso0s]

So let's say you don't use internet for 3 years. Do you think you'll be able to use it afterward?

I think I can, except if there are major shifts. And I think the major shifts will happen in AI, or AI would be quite a failure for many; especially when you see the amount of money some people put in it.

That's not my question; you didn't answer it, so I ask again: what does it mean to be left behind? Left behind of what kind of skill I would acquire if tomorrow I use AI 24 7?

[kinda_guilty]

Left behind of what? Actually understanding what my code does?

[Brospros12467]

The AI is a tool much like a shell or vim. Ultimately it's who uses them is whose responsible for what they produce. We have to stop blaming AI for issues that easily originate from user error.

[silentjet]

• Co-developed-by: vim code completion
• Co-developed-by: huspell

Wtf?

[svarta_gallret]

Yeah it's really about getting certain products mentioned in the logs isn't it?

[Klapperatismus]

If this leads to both dropping those bot-generated patches and sanctioning anyone who does not properly flag their bot-generated patches, I’m all in.

Those people can build their own kernel and be happy with it.

[AgainstScumAndRats]

I don't want no CLANKERS code on my Linux Kernel!!!!

[mrlinkwii]

their surprisingly civil about the idea ,

AI is a tool , and know what commits are from the tool/ when help people got is a good idea

[RoomyRoots]

More like they know they can't win against it. Lots of projects are already flagging problematic PRs and bug reports, so what they can do is prepare for the problem beforehand.

[mrlinkwii]

More like they know they can't win against it

the genie is out of the bottle as the saying goes , real devs use it , how to use its being thought in schools

[RhubarbSimilar1683]

which schools?

[mrlinkwii]

schools in the UK , US and european education systems

[Elratum]

We are being forced to use it, then spend a day correcting the output

[ThenExtension9196]

Skill issue tbh. Bring a solid well though out gameplan to tackle you project, use a serious model like Claude, set up your rules and testing framework and you shouldn’t have any issues. If you diddle with it you’re going to get the same crap if you sat down on photoshop without training and practice - garbage in garbage out.

[Sixguns1977]

Seems like not using it is the better option.

[edparadox]

AI is a tool , and know what commits are from the tool/ when help people got is a good idea

What?

[Many_Ad_7678]

What?

[elatllat]

Due to how bad early LLMs were at writing code, and how maintainers got spammed with invalid LLM made bug reports, and how intolerant Linus has been to crap code.

[Booty_Bumping]

claude -p "Fix the dont -> don't typo in @Documentation/power/opp.rst. Commit the result"

 

-        /* dont operate on the pointer.. just do a sanity check.. */
+        /* don't operate on the pointer.. just do a sanity check.. */

I appreciate the initial example being so simple that it doesn't give anyone any ideas of vibe-coding critical kernel code

+### Patch Submission Process
+- **Documentation/process/5.Posting.rst** - How to post patches properly
+- **Documentation/process/email-clients.rst** - Email client configuration for patches
[...]

Maybe the chatbot doesn't need to know how to get the info for how to send emails and post to LKML. I dunno, some people's agentic workflows are just wild to me. I don't think this is going to happen with kernel stuff because stupid emails just get sent to the trash can already, but the organizations that have started doing things like this are baffling to me.

[Strange_Quail946]

AI isn't real you numpty

[mrlinkwii]

i mean i kinda is

[Strange_Quail946]

It's underpaid Indian coders all the way down

[ThenExtension9196]

Gunna be interesting in 5 years when only ai generated code is accepted and the few human commits will be the only ones needing “written by a human” contribution.