The Lost Path to Seniorhood - GizVault
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:
In open source, we’ve had a long-standing practice — an unwritten but powerful one. Leave the easy stuff for the newcomers. A bug that’s trivial for a seasoned developer? Leave it open. A small patch or documentation fix? Don’t rush to merge it yourself. These were the breadcrumbs we intentionally left behind to help others get in.
By allowing beginners to pick up meaningful, visible work, we offered them a way in. We gave them a chance to build public credit. To get their names in the logs. To learn how the system works — not just the code, but the culture, the process, the expectations.
