Re: [PATCH] Documentation: remove the requirement for LLM attribution

["Theodore Tso" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Jul 02, 2026 at 12:46:19PM -0500, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> It would make sense IMHO to address the ignorance in the most expedient manner,
> namely by telling the *LLM itself* to add this tag when it generates the commit
> message and/or reviews the code.
> 
> This could be achieved by adding a statement in "AGENTS.md" in the root of the
> source tree to this effect, or telling the agent to reference and follow rules
> in Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst regarding the Assisted-by: tag.

This presupposes a particular workflow where the developer allows the
LLM to generate git commits.  I don't do that.  I'll ask the LLM to
modify the code, but then I'll generally fix it up --- very often by
hand because I can edit the sources than entering a prompt and waiting
for the LLM to figure out how to make the change.  I'll often run the
test cases myself, since if it takes 24 hours of VM time, and 2 hours
of wall clock time, I'm going to kick off the regression tests myself,
and verify the test results.

And I almost always write the commit description myself.  So when I
say, "Assisted-by" it literally is "Assisted by".  It is not "vibe
coded where the LLM generates thousands of lines of code that the
human being doesn't understand before sending ta pull request."  And
that's probably why you'll see people asserting that LLM generated
code can't possibly be accepted due to copyright reasons.  There's a
big difference between asking an LLM to modify already existing code
to add a feature, or to fix a bug, and to vibe code a new OS from
scratch.  One is far less likely to be a copyright violation than the
other.

						- Ted