That "Assisted-by" guy here :)

For the record, I submitted a patch on 2.6.19 back in December 2006 when the 802.11 softmac stack was young and still broken on my laptop. I think that means I'm technically not a first timer, if anyone is really counting.

That said, your broader point remains. I think we all appreciate the difference between "understanding" something and the ability to recite the call graph with your eyes closed after three beers.

The gap between those two things is real and I don't think most people - myself especially in this context - should pretend to understand the code they submit in the latter sense. That's reserved for the select few whose shoulders we stand on.

But I doubt I'm ruffling too many feathers when I suggest that writing software of any complexity without formal verification (which is often impossible), especially in languages like C, especially when a code base spans many years and many authors and many styles, is practically guaranteed to induce human failure modes.

So I think the real question we ought to be asking, heavily motivated by the impact of LLM's on both the productivity function and the changing nature of offensive security, is how we can help more people like me safely contribute.

Safely can mean a lot of things. Yes, there's the Rust conversation re: memory management. But more broadly, I think it's documentation, testing, processes, and - probably most controversially - a little more convergence of standards, styles, and even, *gasp*, code.

All of these things are tools that transcend the individual maintainer. And in my opinion, much like the smartest, fastest, strongest hominids lost out to the ones who built the best tools and shared that knowledge, we are at a point where competitive dynamics will do the same to us.

P.S.: since I know some of you have asked or wondered about the why, I'll say that rolling up your sleeves and grabbing a shovel feels much better than sitting anxiously and worrying about what happens when frontier models fall into the wrong hands. I still remember when security was about Theo and Linus's latest argument; let's just say, we're not in Kansas anymore.