Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Annotating patches containing AI-assisted code

[Kees Cook <kees@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 10:20:22AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Sep 2025 11:01:46 -0700
> Kees Cook <kees@kernel.org> wrote:
> 
> > So, what I mean to say is it's certainly useful to declare "I used a
> > chisel", but that for long running sessions it becomes kind of pointless
> > to include much more than a general gist of what the process was. This
> > immediately gets at the "trust" part of this thread making the mentioned
> > "human understanding the generated code" a central issue. How should that
> > be expressed? Our existing commit logs don't do a lot of "show your work"
> > right now, but rather focus on the why/what of a change, and less "how did
> > I write this". It's not strictly absent (some commit logs discuss what
> > alternatives were tried and eliminated, for example), but we've tended
> > to look only at final results and instead use trust in contributors as
> > a stand-in for "prove to me you understand what you've changed".
> 
> I don't think anyone cares if you used AI to help you understand the
> situation or to test your work. But if you had a robot build you the fish
> and you handed that in as your own work, that would be deceptive.

Right, but the LLMs aren't used strictly as a "workflow" assistant. Do
we want to say "I used the chisel to remove a big hunk of wood you can't
see at all in the fish."

Perhaps the issue is to just over-explain when the LLM is in use for
now, and we (as a developer community) will collectively figure out what
turns out to be unimportant or redundant over time. But this can't be
done with a trailer tag: we're going to need relatively verbose notes
in the commit log.

-- 
Kees Cook