Re: [PATCH 2/4] agents: add core development references

Sasha Levin
2025-07-30T18:29:21Z

On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 06:35:28PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 12:25:41PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
>
>> Critical Requirements:
>>
>> * License: ALL code MUST be GPL-2.0 only (see COPYING)
>> * Signed-off-by: Agents MUST NOT add Signed-off-by tags
>> (Only humans can legally certify code submission rights)
>> * Attribution: Agents MUST add Co-developed-by tag:
>> Co-developed-by: $AGENT_NAME $AGENT_MODEL $AGENT_VERSION
>> Examples:
>> - Co-developed-by: Claude claude-3-opus-20240229
>> - Co-developed-by: GitHub-Copilot GPT-4 v1.0.0
>
> * for any patch there must be some entity capable of usefully
> answering questions about that patch. Legal certification
> be damned, there must be somebody able to handle active
> questioning.
>
>And no, it's not the same as with human submitters. If entity
>A sends a patch to maintainer B, who passes it along and gets
>questions/feedback regarding that patch, B might have to resort
>to passing the questions to A, to confirm their understanding
>of the situation. And from what I've seen, LLM tend to do
>very badly in such cases.
>
>IOW, defending any agent-originated patch falls entirely upon
>the human "co-developer". IMO that is a critical requirement.

I agree. Elsewhere in the thread I suggested that a maintainer should be
able to require having tool generated patches come with a Reviewed-by
tag from a "trusted reviewer" (similar to the guidelines we have for
academic researches).

This way you could at least have a human you trust be part of the loop
until you trust the author of those tool generated patches.

--
Thanks,
Sasha