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

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2025 11:01:46 -0700
Kees Cook <kees@kernel.org> wrote:

> So, what I mean to say is it's certainly useful to declare "I used a
> chisel", but that for long running sessions it becomes kind of pointless
> to include much more than a general gist of what the process was. This
> immediately gets at the "trust" part of this thread making the mentioned
> "human understanding the generated code" a central issue. How should that
> be expressed? Our existing commit logs don't do a lot of "show your work"
> right now, but rather focus on the why/what of a change, and less "how did
> I write this". It's not strictly absent (some commit logs discuss what
> alternatives were tried and eliminated, for example), but we've tended
> to look only at final results and instead use trust in contributors as
> a stand-in for "prove to me you understand what you've changed".

I don't think anyone cares if you used AI to help you understand the
situation or to test your work. But if you had a robot build you the fish
and you handed that in as your own work, that would be deceptive.

Saying "this patch has been assisted by LLM $X" is quite too vague and I
don't think that's necessary for most cases. It's only necessary if the AI
created code for you that is beyond the normal "completion" (like filling
out your for loop syntax). I like to use a quick sort example. If you ask
AI to "give me a quick sort routine", that should definitely be expressed
in the change log.

-- Steve