Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Annotating patches containing AI-assisted code

[Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com>]

On 05/08/2025 21:00:10+0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 01:50:57PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 05, 2025 at 05:38:36PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> > >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.
> > 
> > The above isn't really an AI problem though.
> > 
> > We already have folks sending "checkpatch fixes" which only make code
> > less readable or "syzbot fixes" that shut up the warnings but are
> > completely bogus otherwise.
> > 
> > Sure, folks sending "AI fixes" could (will?) be a growing problem, but
> > tackling just the AI side of it is addressing one of the symptoms, not
> > the underlying issue.
> 
> Perfect, let's document a policy and kill two birds with one stone then.
> 

Yes, I was going to bring up static checkers and the patches generated
to fix warnings that don't make sense. I'd like contributor to
explicitly state they used a tool to find an "issue" and generate the
patch so I could more easily ignore them. For example, we have been
adding plenty of return value checks and error messages for things that
are never going to happen or is they happen, the system is a state so
bad that it will never get to print the string.

-- 
Alexandre Belloni, co-owner and COO, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com