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

[Lorenzo Stoakes <ljs@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Jul 01, 2026 at 05:54:48PM +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>

FWIW I'm fine with this. We can always send the comment stuff as a follow up. So:

Reviewed-by: Lorenzo Stoakes <ljs@kernel.org>

Maybe send it non-RFC with a cleaned up commit msg? Feel free to add my tag to
that.

> ---
>  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
>

Cheers, Lorenzo