Re: [PATCH] mm/damon: introduce DAMON-based NUMA memory tiering module

[David Hildenbrand (Arm)]

On 3/27/26 16:22, Josh Law wrote:
> 
> 
>>
>> Josh,
>>
>> in general we try to be a welcoming upstream community. Finding people
>> that are willing to work on the low-level bits and stick around is rare.
>>
>> At the same time, we need people that are willing to get familiar with
>> the code base and technology, so they can help out with review and
>> provide long-term value to the project. AI use is only partially useful
>> in that context. Certainly not for writing patches as a newbie. At best,
>> to double-check your understanding (e.g., AI review), help you learn
>> (e.g., explore the code base), or improve your writing if your English
>> is really, really bad.
>>
>> I prefer someone trying to use their own words to compose a change log
>> and actually learn something on the way over some AI slop that reads
>> nicer any day. Often, when you write a changelog you actually realize
>> which corner cases you might be missing, that the design might be overly
>> complicated, that, maybe, the reasoning or motivation is bad etc. It
>> takes time but you actually learn something and are forced to think
>> (crazy, right?).
>>
>> The same is particularly true when it comes to writing documentation, as
>> people raised earlier in other context.
>>
>> Having that said, your actions made a lot of people's alarms go off and
>> there is pretty much 0 trust now. As Lorenzo says, even now we are not
>> really sure if you are saying the truth right now, which is a big problem.
>>
>> If you are, in fact, a real person, and are passionate to work on the
>> kernel, it would be best if you would start things very slowly and don't
>> use any AI for crafting your patches (including patch descriptions).
>> Stick to one subsystem and ask people what good starting tasks/projects
>> could be.
>>
>> Ideally, you'd find someone people trust around here, that can verify
>> your identity (i.e., have a video chat etc) and start mentoring you on
>> how to start working in the kernel community and gain trust.
>>
>> Now, I am still not sure whether I am talking to a bot here (there are
>> too many things Lorenzo points out above that are very suspicious), but
>> I just wanted to say that there are ways to become a trusted
>> contributor, and that information might be useful for other people that
>> might be interested in working on the kernel.
>>
>> It's certainly not by flooding the list with AI slop.
>>
> 
> 
> Hello david, thanks for being polite about this whole thing!
> 
> 
> so, you are talking to a real human, i promise you that now

That's exactly, what I would say if I were a bot ;)

As a first step, fix the line wrapping. The following document was
helpful to me in the past:

	Documentation/process/email-clients.rst

> 
> 
> I am looking for people to personally mentor me, so i succseed in the kernel
> 
> And, I know this is unprofessinal (and im sorry!), but my github is my best friend, i have a year worth of commits for you to see publicly, also i work with android custom roms. (Any questions, feel free to ask!)
> 
> 
> 
> So yes, this is my oppotunity to be honest,
> 
> 
> (Yes. I do use AI!)
> 
> 
> The reason why, is im a "perfectionist", i want to start human patches, but im scared i will get ripped apart, (or i wont get like reviewership!! Because im too slow) so i use claude (smartest ai in the market), and i regret it. Like seriously!

There is this nice saying "we learn from our mistakes".

I still remember the first time Linus ripped apart one of my patches. I
learned something that day.

> 
> Additionally, i hate being slow, im scared that the community will ditch me if i do 1 human patch every 2-4 weeks, which is my expected time (because i need to understand the code!!!!!)
>


Well, doing 8 versions of one patch set a day is obviously the other
extreme ;) For example, there is this unwritten rule to wait ~1 week
(and before discussions slowed down) before sending another revision.
There are exceptions of course.

In general, we're lacking reviewers, not code contributors. So we really
need people that can get familiar with the code and gain expertise, to
help the project long term.

Drive-by AI generated patches that mostly just consume more of the
precious maintainer+reviewer time are rather counter-productive.

> 
> I would love to have a mentor to help me around, and when (if) somebody wants to, i promise you now, i will start making human patches, and i will benefit the community positively,
> 

I think you had some patches accepted my maintainers, you might want to
consider reaching out to them to see if they would be willing to help.

But be aware that most people are extremely busy.

-- 
Cheers,

David