On Tue, Oct 13, 2026 at 07:42:43PM +0200, Laurent Pinchart wrote: > I'm increasingly thinking that the Mesa policy of requiring commit > messages to be manually written (possibly with machine translation) > could be applied to the kernel. > > I've heard multiple people saying how using LLMs made them more > productive, with an extreme example during the maintainer summit of > Linus talking about doing in a couple of months what would have likely > taken multiple years. The same people like to tell how they're in charge > of the whole process, how they control the machine, and how they have a > deep understanding of what they're doing. If that's the case, surely > writing a commit message will not increase the development time back > from a few months to a few years, the extra effort would be negligible. > > Most commit messages generated by LLMs are quite easy to identify today. > Requiring a human-written message would be a good way to quickly ignore > patches submitted by meat proxies. And before anyone tells me this will > change very soon with <insert employer's new model>, I'll say we will > update our process when that happens.
I agree on the face of it, but it's just as unenforceable as the Assisted-by tag was. :( My own recent commit logs are, like the code, a combination of work from me and the LLM. I trim and edit and reorganize and add/remove stuff all the time (code or commit log). And all the while, tweaking its rules for how to write prose, so I do less and less editing. (And maybe my commit logs are now too verbose? I'm not sure; I've regularly been told I was too terse before, so hopefully there will be a balance found.) And as far as spotting this kind of thing, I've already failed the Reverse Turing Test[1], where I thought some of Lorenzo's (justifiably) verbose commit logs were all LLM generated, so the inflection point for clearly distinguishing is here or fast approaching. -Kees [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/202609150943.000EC9277@keescook/ -- Kees Cook
