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

[Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org>]

On 13/10/2026 14:15, Sasha Levin 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>

Thanks for extending the rationale. I don't care that much about tag,
because sloppy slop contributors will easily ignore the tag requirement
and people started adding it to trivial one liners in DT bindings (which
are so damn trivial it is a crime against our energy resources to run
any AI assisting tool). Basically with or without the tag, ganz egal,
but what matters is to have some justification in the commit msg, thus
for that:

Acked-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org>

Best regards,
Krzysztof