There’s big news today from the Linux kernel community. Sasha Levin — long-time contributor, LTS co-maintainer, and now at NVIDIA — just proposed a set of AI contribution guidelines for the kernel. The idea is to introduce documentation and configuration files that help AI coding assistants like Claude and Grok properly participate in kernel development. With it comes rules on attribution and contribution etiquette when AI gets involved.

It tries to manage the inevitable: AI tools are already being used to write patches. Ignoring that reality doesn’t make it go away.

But while this might feel like just another practical policy change, there’s a deeper, one we can’t afford to ignore in the open source world:

What happens to the juniors?

https://www.gizvault.com/archives/the-lost-path-to-seniorhood