i love that we went from "zero trust" as a fundamental buzzword to "trust autonomous nondeterministic agents everywhere in your stack"

This is kind of a silly take. Niantic are absolutely opportunists, who certainly didn’t see AI coming when Pokémon Go or Ingress premiered. What they’ve always been interested in is being a *source of user geolocation data* which they can monetise. First way was lucrative Pokémon IP. Now it’s AI.

As the number of LLM-generated patches in my inbox increases, I am starting to experience the sort of maintainer stress that has long been predicted. But there's another aspect of this that has recently crossed my mind.

Just over a week ago, a new personality showed up with a whole pile of machine-generated patches claiming to fill in our memory-management documentation. A few reviewers had some sharp questions, the response to which has been ... silence. This person doesn't seem to have cared enough about that work to make an effort to get past the initial resistance.

Once upon a time, somebody who had produced many pages of MM documentation would be invested enough in that work to make at least a minimal attempt to defend it.

Kernel developers often worry that a patch submitter will not stick around to maintain the code they are trying to push upstream. Part of the gauntlet of getting kernel patches accepted can be seen as a sort of "are you serious?" test.

When somebody submits a big pile of machine-generated code, though, will they be *able* to maintain it? And will they be sufficiently invested in this code, which they didn't write and probably don't understand, to stick around and fix the inevitable problems that will arise? I rather fear not, and that does not bode well for the long-term maintainability of our software.

Some tips on giving digital privacy/security advice: if you tell people they absolutely need to do a long list of difficult and expensive things before they travel, people will nod and smile and then not do it at all. This is why my advice focuses on harm reduction and understanding trade-offs.