[MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Annotating patches containing AI-assisted code

[Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.com>]

This proposal is pretty much followup/spinoff of the discussion currently 
happening on LKML in one of the sub-threads of [1].

This is not really about legal aspects of AI-generated code and patches, I 
believe that'd be handled well handled well by LF, DCO, etc.

My concern here is more "human to human", as in "if I need to talk to a 
human that actually does understand the patch deeply enough, in context, 
etc .. who is that?"

I believe we need to at least settle on (and document) the way how to 
express in patch (meta)data:

- this patch has been assisted by LLM $X
- the human understanding the generated code is $Y

We might just implicitly assume this to be the first person in the S-O-B 
chain (which I personally don't think works for all scenarios, you can 
have multiple people working on it, etc), but even in such case I believe 
this needs to be clearly documented.

Plus, to further quote Laurent from that very thread:

===
I'm pretty sure every maintainer keeps a mental list of trust scores, and 
uses them when reviewing patches. Patch submitter who doesn't perform due 
diligence usually lose points, especially if the offences occur repeatedly 
(newcomers often get a few free passes thanks to their inexperience and 
the benefit of the doubt, at least with most maintainers).

LLMs increase the scale of the problem, and also makes it easier to fake 
due diligence. I believe it's important to make it very clear to 
contributors that they will suffer consequences if they don't hold up to 
the standards we expect.
===

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250727195802.2222764-1-sashal@kernel.org/

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs