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

[Weijie Yuan <wy@wyuan.org>]

On 2026-10-13 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/
> 
> 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: Weijie Yuan <wy@wyuan.org>

Thanks!

> Changes in v2:
> - Expand the changelog with the background and the Maintainers Summit
>   discussion (Laurent, Krzysztof, Greg, Lorenzo).
> - Rebase on docs-next and also remove the Assisted-by sections from the
>   pt_BR and zh_TW translations there.
> - Collect tags.
> 
> v1: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20261009083137.3-1-sashal@kernel.org/
> 
>  Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst   | 21 +------------------
>  Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst  | 10 ---------
>  .../it_IT/process/submitting-patches.rst      | 10 ---------
>  .../pt_BR/process/coding-assistants.rst       | 20 ------------------
>  .../pt_BR/process/submitting-patches.rst      | 10 ---------
>  .../zh_TW/process/submitting-patches.rst      |  7 -------
>  scripts/checkpatch.pl                         | 11 ----------
>  7 files changed, 1 insertion(+), 88 deletions(-)

[...]

> diff --git a/Documentation/translations/zh_TW/process/submitting-patches.rst b/Documentation/translations/zh_TW/process/submitting-patches.rst
> index b780f1539b46b..4a7c046b23894 100644
> --- a/Documentation/translations/zh_TW/process/submitting-patches.rst
> +++ b/Documentation/translations/zh_TW/process/submitting-patches.rst
> @@ -503,13 +503,6 @@ Fixes: 指示補丁修復了之前提交中的一個缺陷。它可以便於確
>  的。注意，就此而言bugzilla.kernel.org是公開場所，但其中使用的電子郵件地址
>  是私密的；因此不要在標籤中暴露它們，除非該人在先前的貢獻中使用過。
>  
> -使用Assisted-by:
> -----------------
> -
> -如果您在建立補丁的過程中使用了任何進階編碼工具，您需要透過添加Assisted-by
> -標籤來聲明這一使用。不這樣做可能會妨礙您的工作被接受。關於聲明編碼助手的
> -細節，請參見 Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst 。
> -
>  .. _tw_the_canonical_patch_format:
>  
>  標準補丁格式

Thanks for doing this.