On Wed, 2026-07-01 at 17:54 +0200, Christian Brauner wrote: > I remain very confused by our coding assistant contribution guidelines. > I'm going to be a bit polemic now but this seriously in good faith. > > Why precisely do we require all this detailed information about what > specific coding assistant was used? > > I find it very irritating that our git history has effectively started > to function a bit like a free advertising platform for a bunch of AI > companies and their proprietary agents and models. > > And it reamins unclear to me what exactly we do get out of this detailed > information: Do we want to run statistical analysis on what agent and > model is used the most and publish that on LWN at some point? > > I acknowledge that my stance is even more radical: imho we would just > stop it with any disclosure requirements completely. It's useless imho. > We already see that other than core contributors most people don't care > and will just not disclose their usage of AI. I think this is entirely > pointless and worse it brings in undefined legal status as well. It's > not like recent events of pulling certain models from the face of the > earth have made this any less concerning. > > But fine, if we want to do this can we please just dumb it down to > > Assisted-by: LLM > > or > > Assisted-by: Coding Assistant > > or something else. That still gives the "careful review" signal to > reviewers that want to pay special attention to LLM generated work while > avoiding this slew of metadata. > > Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner (Amutable) <[email protected]> > --- > Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst | 8 ++------ > 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) > > diff --git a/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst > b/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst > index 899f4459c52d..fe34f3e7e828 100644 > --- a/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst > +++ b/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst > @@ -43,12 +43,8 @@ When AI tools contribute to kernel development, proper > attribution > helps track the evolving role of AI in the development process. > Contributions should include an Assisted-by tag in the following format:: > > - Assisted-by: AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION [TOOL1] [TOOL2] > + Assisted-by: LLM [TOOL1] [TOOL2] > > -Where: > - > -* ``AGENT_NAME`` is the name of the AI tool or framework > -* ``MODEL_VERSION`` is the specific model version used > * ``[TOOL1] [TOOL2]`` are optional specialized analysis tools used > (e.g., coccinelle, sparse, smatch, clang-tidy) > > @@ -56,4 +52,4 @@ Basic development tools (git, gcc, make, editors) should > not be listed. > > Example:: > > - Assisted-by: Claude:claude-3-opus coccinelle sparse > + Assisted-by: LLM coccinelle sparse > > --- > base-commit: dc59e4fea9d83f03bad6bddf3fa2e52491777482 > change-id: 20260701-work-coding-assistants-650ae1202ee0
In general, collecting data for nebulous purposes usually turns out to be a bad idea. If we're not 100% clear on why we want this data, then we're probably better off not collecting it at all. With that in mind: if we're going to water down the tag, then I say just remove the requirement altogether. If we later decide that we want to start collecting more detailed info for some (clear) purpose then we can revisit the idea. -- Jeff Layton <[email protected]>
