“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 kernel is already shit for humans to contribute to🤷
Let’s be honest, mailing lists are garbage and just increase the barrier to contribution. They lack nearly everything useful for reviewing code and giving feedback.
They are wonderful for LLMs though. Somebody unwilling to learn the arcane crap needed to contribute just pushes it out to an LLM. It’s easier for them to contribute than humans.