Arm principal software engineer Lorenzo Stoakes is pulling back from general patch review in the Linux kernel after an influx of AI-generated code submissions made his inbox unmanageable.
Stoakes has contributed to the kernel since 2014 and holds maintainerships covering memory mapping, madvise, and reverse mapping. He announced the change in a mailing-list post, stating that he will keep those maintainer roles but will no longer review code outside the areas he owns.
“Given the current throughput in the kernel resulting from AI-generated series, I unfortunately lack the bandwidth to generally be able to offer review except in those areas I maintain,” Stoakes wrote, adding that he wanted to make his inbox “a little more manageable.”
In an interview with The Register, Stoakes explained that the composition of his review queue had evolved from sporadic rubbish to nearly 50% of all incoming material.
“But the AI wave is hitting [memory management] across the board, really,” he said.
The episode highlights a widening bottleneck in open-source development where finding bugs has become cheap, while judging and repairing them has not. Microsoft’s FORGE Lab said that its MDASH scanning system recently produced 59 upstream Linux kernel bug reports, with one flaw dating back at least 21 years.
That total is modest next to the broader flow of vulnerabilities. The Linux Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures team averaged about 27 CVEs a day in 2026 through November 2, according to ZDNET. Meanwhile, Microsoft disclosed 726 CVEs in its latest Patch Tuesday release, with a large share originating from automated tooling.
During the Open Source Summit Europe, stable release kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman sounded the alarm.
“The onslaught of the LLM-generated patches… we don’t have enough people to review them all,” he said. “We need more reviewers. We don’t have enough.”
Other maintainers face similar pressures across different projects. Maintainers of other projects like Godot have also lamented the flood of AI-generated code, while it has been reported that roughly 25% of new pull requests are considered AI slop.
Through a post on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Linus Torvalds said that artificial intelligence corrections accounted for a significant portion of the fresh code present in the Linux 7.4 release candidate. He said that in the BPF subsystem, fixes are now arriving faster than new reports, calling it a sign that the tide may be starting to turn while cautioning readers not to hold their breath.
Kroah-Hartman expressed a less optimistic view when asked whether AI-assisted fixes are catching up with AI-generated reports. He said that the project is getting closer but not quite there yet, declining to estimate when that equilibrium might arrive.
