Kernel News

Kernel News

Article from Issue 303/2026
Author(s):

Chronicler Zack Brown discusses AI in the kernel.

AI in the Kernel

With the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) large-language models (LLMs), the use of chatbot coding assistants has exploded throughout the software world, including in open source projects. There are many questions, such as will they replace human software developers entirely? Will they decide to kill us all? And, not least, how much credit do these AI coding assistants deserve when used by developers? As Sasha Levin recently put it, "As AI tools become increasingly common in software development, it's important to establish clear guidelines for their use in kernel development."

Sasha posted a patch, offering some unified configuration files for some of the top coding assistants, including Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codeium, Continue, Windsurf Editor, and Aider. This would hopefully, he said, make sure that all AI assistants would have similar behaviors.

Beyond that, Sasha posted another patch, instructing the AI assistants in the Linux kernel's coding standards, development processes, license requirements, and attribution.

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