Re: [PATCH] docs: remove Assisted-by references

[Kees Cook <kees@kernel.org>]

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