Linux 7.2 was one of the busiest kernel cycles ever, and LWN is worried who understands the patches
The 7.2 cycle merged 16,418 changesets from a record 2,652 developers, 613 of them first-timers. LLM-assisted patches are a growing share of it.
1,111 changes carry Assisted-by tags, up from 301 in 7.1, and 252 commits credit the Sashiko review system with the report. LWN says the surge in Fixes tags looks like people using LLMs to hunt bugs in old code.
Its worry: if the flood of patches continues, the kernel could end up with code nobody fully understands.
The 7.2 numbers
LWN's statistics put the cycle at 16,418 non-merge changesets, second only to 6.7. A record 2,652 developers took part, beating 7.1's 2,479, and 613 were new. The leading contributors by changesets were Uwe Kleine-König (151), Rosen Penev (146) and Ian Rogers (138); by lines changed, Matthew Stewart and Hawking Zhang led through machine-generated amdgpu headers. Intel (1,512), Google (1,191) and Red Hat (873) top the employer list, after "unknown" at 2,743.
Tools, bugs and a big experiment
LWN links the jump in Fixes-tagged commits (4,830) to people using LLMs to look for bugs in existing code. It expects bug-finding to slow eventually, since the number of bugs is finite, but does not assume it. If it does not, the worry is patches submitted by people who do not fully understand them, leaving maintainers with code "that nobody understands" to keep.
The piece's wording is that "a massive experiment is being run on the kernel's development processes and community." A commenter noted that the HN submission title originally editorialized this as a bug-finding story, and dang reverted it to LWN's own headline.
A maintainer's view: bug counts down, patch floods up
"The agent helps a lot to fix bugs. Just point the agents at the bug reports. They do the reproduction, debugging and fixes. We 'just' have to review." — a developer of the Slint UI library
He observed that bug reports to his project are declining because users' agents work around problems instead of reporting them, while huge agent-written PRs are hard to review.
"It honestly doesn't want to make me open anything for outside contributions anymore." — a commenter on slop patches
That matches LWN's concern from the other side: the people with the least capacity to read patches are the ones receiving more of them.
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