this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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What will happen if the Linux kernel starts having AI generated code in it?

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 17 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Nothing? I mean an if/else works the same way, no matter if it's written by a human or an AI or a cat or whatever...

The Linux kernel developers are opinionated, though. Everything gets quite an amount of scrutiny. There will be several people having their eyes on submissions. They're looking for security vulnerabilities. They're adamant on maintainability. Have a standard on how to phrase things, indent lines... Send in the patches... They generally have high standards. I mean if someone submits some AI slop, there's a high chance it just gets declined and they're getting scolded for doing it.

There's of course always the chance someone tries to sneak something in. Or it creeps in on its own. But it's the same for bugs or security attacks. And maybe some of the devs work for companies who push AI and they'll do silly things. But the Linux community is pretty strong. They'll find a way to handle it. And maybe in the far future, AI will get as good as human programmers and there won't be an issue accepting AI code, because it has the same quality as human code. But that's science fiction as of now.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Code is code supposedly, but choosing to pursue it with AI is a real danger: how much AI slop will be presented to developers by morons or trolls?

Here's 49 examples of worthless AI slop in just one project that wasted developer time. All of them supposedly fix security bugs.

I can't think of a faster way to demoralize developers than through a torrent of AI-powerws slop spam, and considering Debian lost its entire data protection team, this seems like the worst possible time to make circumstances worse.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

That's correct. I went with OP's original question, what happens after it happened... Not sure what OP meant, they're nowhere in the comments... Maybe they're a bot as well, and we're subject to the very same thing we're talking about, right now...

But sure. All the fabricated pull requests, issue reports etc are massively problematic. We got quite some bot activity. Then we also need to protect our servers and platforms from their crawlers who just DDOS everyone... Documentation went down the drain, StackOverflow, Reddit... The industry is trying to get rid of entry level programmer positions, so you'll have a bad time entering the job market as any programmer... We're just drowned in all that stuff. Supply chains also get affected by AI, people need to choose between using existing libraries, licensing, money... Or replacing it with something the AI generated...