I don’t recall any discussion of the “open v. proprietary model” issue during the sessions. The same category of discussion came up 20 years ago when git was invented to replace a proprietary source control system (BitKeeper) to track kernel changes, and it still makes sense now to have this conversation about LLM coding tools.

I’m aware of a few kernel developers looking into the idea of using open models, however. Certainly available open models are good enough to handle simpler coding tasks, but currently the proprietary models are unmatched at handling complex problems and analysis that is sometimes needed for kernel development. As the economics of purchasing and running hardware at home with sufficiently capable models evolves, we should see people showing up with recipes and success stories. I recently saw a video that demonstrated using Hermes to automatically route prompts to a local open models or a fee-based API, based on prompt complexity — but this was an AI special-interest demonstration, not a kernel development set-up.