In the long term AI will likely decrease the contributors as already seen with AI blowing up some traditional communities. I do not agree to the AI hype, but I doubt that. The vast majority of the kernel code is hardware device drivers because one of the main functions of the kernel is hardware abstraction. Hardware is made by companies and being able to use ai will not reduce, rather increase their willingness to submit open source device drivers. If they do not, LLMs also seem to make it easier to reverse-engineer closed source Windows drivers. Another thing to keep in mind is that the Linux kernel is quality-wise far above 99.9% of software projects. This means that you cannot apply observations of the effect of GenAI on software in general on the kernel, and also not vice versa. The usage of GenAI could totally trash 99% of company code bases, and the kernel would still be fine. Also, the way the kernel allows usage of LLlMs is not necessarily a good blueprint for other open source projects.