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

[Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>]

On Wed, 2026-07-01 at 17:54 +0200, 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
> 
> or something else. That still gives the "careful review" signal to
> reviewers that want to pay special attention to LLM generated work while
> avoiding this slew of metadata.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner (Amutable) <brauner@kernel.org>
> ---
>  Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst | 8 ++------
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst b/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst
> index 899f4459c52d..fe34f3e7e828 100644
> --- a/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst
> +++ b/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst
> @@ -43,12 +43,8 @@ When AI tools contribute to kernel development, proper attribution
>  helps track the evolving role of AI in the development process.
>  Contributions should include an Assisted-by tag in the following format::
>  
> -  Assisted-by: AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION [TOOL1] [TOOL2]
> +  Assisted-by: LLM [TOOL1] [TOOL2]
>  
> -Where:
> -
> -* ``AGENT_NAME`` is the name of the AI tool or framework
> -* ``MODEL_VERSION`` is the specific model version used
>  * ``[TOOL1] [TOOL2]`` are optional specialized analysis tools used
>    (e.g., coccinelle, sparse, smatch, clang-tidy)
>  
> @@ -56,4 +52,4 @@ Basic development tools (git, gcc, make, editors) should not be listed.
>  
>  Example::
>  
> -  Assisted-by: Claude:claude-3-opus coccinelle sparse
> +  Assisted-by: LLM coccinelle sparse
> 
> ---
> base-commit: dc59e4fea9d83f03bad6bddf3fa2e52491777482
> change-id: 20260701-work-coding-assistants-650ae1202ee0


In general, collecting data for nebulous purposes usually turns out to
be a bad idea. If we're not 100% clear on why we want this data, then
we're probably better off not collecting it at all.

With that in mind: if we're going to water down the tag, then I say
just remove the requirement altogether. If we later decide that we want
to start collecting more detailed info for some (clear) purpose then we
can revisit the idea.
-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>