Re: [PATCH v2] docs: remove Assisted-by references

[SJ Park <sj@kernel.org>]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:15:01 -0400 Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org> wrote:

> Commit 78d979db6cef ("docs: add AI Coding Assistants documentation") asked
> contributors to add an Assisted-by tag to patches developed with help from an
> LLM, and commit 816d9992d9ed ("coding-assistants: simplify attribution") later
> reduced the tag to "Assisted-by: LLM".
> 
> A proposal to drop the tag was turned down in July [1]. The main argument for
> keeping it was that maintainers wanted a signal that a patch was LLM-assisted,
> so that they could review it accordingly.
> 
> The tag came up again at the 2026 Maintainers Summit [2]. Roughly 10% of the
> 18,533 non-merge commits in 7.3 through -rc7 carry an Assisted-by tag, while
> actual LLM use is far more widespread. Some contributors do not know about the
> rule, others leave the tag off on purpose, and few maintainers ask about it. As
> a result, the tag does not provide the signal it was kept for: its absence says
> nothing about how a patch was made, and for developers who use these tools for
> almost everything, its presence says little more. The choice was between
> finding a way to enforce the requirement and dropping it, and there was a
> strong, though not unanimous, consensus in the room to drop it. Greg
> Kroah-Hartman, who argued for keeping the tag in July, supports removing it now
> [3].
> 
> Maintainers do still want to know how a patch was created, but the view at the
> Summit was that this belongs in the cover letter, where it can describe how the
> tools were used, rather than in the changelog.
> Documentation/process/generated-content.rst already asks contributors to be
> transparent about tool use and is not changed here. The rules on the DCO and on
> the submitter's responsibility for the patch stay as they are.
> 
> Remove the Assisted-by sections from coding-assistants.rst,
> submitting-patches.rst, and the Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Traditional
> Chinese translations, and drop the handling of the tag from checkpatch.
> 
> [1] https://lore.kernel.org/workflows/2026070224-unholy-commode-cf45@gregkh/
> [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/1099594/
> [3] https://lore.kernel.org/all/2026101327-cupid-legal-6cf6@gregkh/

Thank you for the nice description of the rationale.

> 
> Acked-by: Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) <ljs@kernel.org>
> Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <kees@kernel.org>
> Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
> Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>

Acked-by: SJ Park <sj@kernel.org>


Thanks,
SJ

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