AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

Generating software still token costs, generating something like ms-word will still cost a significant amount, takes a lot of human effort to prompt and validate. Having a proven solution still has value.

From everything I'm seeing in the industry (I'm basically a noncoder choosing to not use AI in the stuff that I make, and privy to the private work experience of coders and creators also in that field because of human social contacts), I feel like I can shed a bit of light.

It looks to me like a more restrictive policy will be flat-out impossible.

Even people I trust are going along with this stuff, akin to CAD replacing drafting. Code is logic as language, and starting with web code and rapidly metastasizing to C++ (due to complexity and the sheer size of the extant codebase, good and bad) the AI has turned slop-coding to a 'solved problem'. If you don't mean to do the best possible thing or a new thing there is no excuse for existing as a coder in the world of AI.

If you do expect to do a new thing or a best thing, in theory you're required to put out the novel information as AI cannot reach it until you've entered it into the corpus of existing code the AI's built on. However, if you're simply recombining existing aspects of the code language in a novel way, that might be more reachable… that's probably where 'AI escape velocity' will come from should it occur.

In practice, everybody I know is relegating the busywork of coding to AI. I don't feel social pressure to do the same but I'm not a coder. I'm something else that produces MIT-licensed codebases for accomplishing things that aren't represented in code AS code, rather it's for accomplishing things that are specific and experiential. I write code to make specific noises I'm not hearing elsewhere, and not hearing out of the mainstream of 'sound-making code artifacts'.

Therefore, it's impractical for Linux to take any position forbidding AI-assisted code. People will just lie and claim they did it. Is primitive tab-complete also AI? Where's the line? What about when coding tools uniformly begin to tab-complete with extensive reasoning and code prototyping? I already see this in the JetBrains Rider editor I use for Godot hacking, even though I've turned off everything I can related to AI. It'll still try to tab-complete patterns it thinks it recognizes, rarely with what I intend.

And so the choice is to enforce responsibility. I think this is appropriate because that's where the choices will matter. Additions and alterations will be the responsibility of specific human people, which won't handle everything negative that's happening but will allow for some pressures and expectations that are useful.

I don't think you can be a collaborative software project right now and not deal with this in some way. I get out of it because I'm read-only: I'm writing stuff on a codebase that lives on an antique laptop without internet access that couldn't run AI if it tried. Very likely the only web browsers it can run are similarly unable to handle 2026 web pages, though I've not checked in years. You've only got my word for that, though, and your estimation of my veracity based on how plausible it seems (I code publically on livestreams, and am not at all an impressive coder when I do that). Linux can't do what I do, so it's going to do what Linux does, and this seems the best option.

> Does a digitally encoded version resemble a copyrighted work in some shape or form?

Well that's different because an encoded image or video clearly intends to reproduce the original perfectly and the end result after decoding is (intentionally) very close to form of the original. Which makes it a clear cut case of being a copy of the original.

The reason so many cases don't get very far is that mostly judges and lawyers don't think like engineers. Copyright law predates most modern technology. So, everything needs to be rephrased in terms of people copying stuff for commercial gain. The original target of the law was people using printing presses to create copies of books written by others. Which was hugely annoying to some publishers who thought they had exclusive deals with authors. But what about academics quoting each other? Or literary reviews. Or summaries. Or people reading from a book on the radio? This stuff gets complicated quickly. Most of those things were settled a long time ago. Fair use is a concept that gets wielded a lot for this. Yes its a copy but its entirely reasonable for the copy holder to be doing what they are doing and therefore not considered an infringement.

The rest is just centuries of legal interpretation of that and how it applies to modern technology. Whether that's DJs sampling music or artists working in visual imagery into their art works. AI is mostly just more of the same here. Yes there are some legally interesting aspects with AI but not that many new ones. Judges are unlikely to rethink centuries of legal interpretations here and are more likely to try to reconcile AI in with existing decisions. Any changes to the law would have to be driven by politicians; judges tend to be conservative with their interpretations.

He's been vibecoding some stuff himself personally, on one of his scuba projects. You could take people as actually believing in the things they do and say.

The point wasn't about the number of people, the point was a company which employs that number of people has enough money which can be converted to leverage against you.

Besides that, your whole arguments hinges on large companies being inflexible, inefficient and poorly run. Isn't that exactly the kind of problem AI promises to solve? Complete AI surveillance of every employee, tasks and instructions tailored to each individual and superhuman planning. Of course at that point, the only employees will be manual workers because actual AI will be much better and cheaper at everything than every human, except those things where it needs to interact with the physical world. Even contract negotiations with both employees and customers will be done with AI instead of humans, the human will only sign off on it for legal requirements just like today you technically enter a contract with a representative of the company who is not even there when you talk to a negotiator.