Re: [PATCH RFC] coding-assistants: simplify attribution

["David Hildenbrand (Arm)" <david@kernel.org>]

On 7/1/26 17:54, Christian Brauner wrote:
> I remain very confused by our coding assistant contribution guidelines.
> I'm going to be a bit polemic now but this seriously in good faith.
> 
> Why precisely do we require all this detailed information about what
> specific coding assistant was used?
> 
> I find it very irritating that our git history has effectively started
> to function a bit like a free advertising platform for a bunch of AI
> companies and their proprietary agents and models.
> 
> And it reamins unclear to me what exactly we do get out of this detailed
> information: Do we want to run statistical analysis on what agent and
> model is used the most and publish that on LWN at some point?
> 
> I acknowledge that my stance is even more radical: imho we would just
> stop it with any disclosure requirements completely. It's useless imho.
> We already see that other than core contributors most people don't care
> and will just not disclose their usage of AI. I think this is entirely
> pointless and worse it brings in undefined legal status as well. It's
> not like recent events of pulling certain models from the face of the
> earth have made this any less concerning.
> 
> But fine, if we want to do this can we please just dumb it down to
> 
> Assisted-by: LLM
> 
> or
> 
> Assisted-by: Coding Assistant

I'd prefer this.

The doc states "proper attribution helps track the evolving role of AI in the
development process". If there is another reason why we need the free
advertisement, we should document it.

Side note: if someone instructs an LLM exactly what to do, and would have
achieved the same thing just typing it in, the use of the tag is not any helpful
to me. (similar to "Assisted-by: vim" would not be helpful).

What would be much more relevant to know is to which degree LLMs were used.

Assisted-by: LLM # translate commit message
Assisted-by: LLM # generate some test cases
Assisted-by: LLM # cleanup logic
Assisted-by: LLM # everything and I have no clue what any in here does

I thought we ask for that in some document, but couldn't immediately find it
(and nobody does that).

-- 
Cheers,

David