Re: [PATCH 0/4] Add agent coding assistant configuration to Linux kernel

Sasha Levin
2025-07-30T16:36:27Z

On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 12:18:29PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>On Wed, 30 Jul 2025 16:34:28 +0100
>Lorenzo Stoakes <lorenzo.stoakes@oracle.com> wrote:
>
>> > Which looked like someone else (now Cc'd on this thread) took it public,
>> > and I wanted to see where that ended. I didn't want to start another
>> > discussion when there's already two in progress.
>>
>> OK, but having a document like this is not in my view optional - we must
>> have a clear, stated policy and one which ideally makes plain that it's
>> opt-in and maintainers may choose not to take these patches.
>
>That sounds pretty much exactly as what I was stating in our meeting. That
>is, it is OK to submit a patch written with AI but you must disclose it. It
>is also the right of the Maintainer to refuse to take any patch that was
>written in AI. They may feel that they want someone who fully understands

This should probably be a stronger statement if we don't have it in the
docs yet: a maintainer can refuse to take any patch, period.

>what that patch does, and AI can cloud the knowledge of that patch from the
>author.

Maybe we should unify this with the academic research doc we already
have?

This way we can extend MAINTAINERS to indicate which subsystems are
more open to research work (drivers/staging/ comes to mind) vs ones that
aren't.

Some sort of a "traffic light" system:

1. Green: the subsystem is happy to receive patches from any source.

2. Yellow: "If you're unfamiliar with the subsystem and using any
tooling to generate your patches, please have a reviewed-by from a
trusted developer before sending your patch".

3. No tool-generated patches without prior maintainer approval.

--
Thanks,
Sasha