Replying to MM maintainer Andrew Morton, who asked whether a “Nacked-by” was allowed and told him to “hang in there,” Stoakes described how the problem grew: “Of course the AI wave has been horrible, and is getting significantly worse. At first it was once in a while that I’d see slop. Then it was at least once a week. Then every few days. Nowadays it’s pretty much half of what I see, if not more” [2]. He called the change “mostly about cutting down the noise in my inbox” and said he will likely still review other work when needed [2][3]. MM maintainer David Hildenbrand acked the series with “Yeah, it’s crazy” [5], and reviewer Lance Yang wrote that “with the AI flood these days, inbox zero just isn’t happening” [3].
Stoakes had raised the issue before. In July he complained that “the amount of time wasted on AI slop is already too much and we’re only at the start of this,” and about a month ago said “what kills the project is having 1,000 slop submissions that 2 or 3 people have to do something with,” Tom’s Hardware reported [4].
The step-back lands the same week Linus Torvalds wrote that “much of” Linux 7.4-rc2 “was driven by various AI fixes” and relayed a BPF maintainer’s view that fixes now outpace new bug reports (MLQ.ai coverage). The kernel does not require AI-assisted patches to be labeled as such [4], so the filtering falls to the small group of human reviewers in each subsystem.