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

[Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2025, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:

> On my tests with AI, humans need to modify it anyway. It reminds me
> the (not so) good old code generators we had in the past: AI-generated
> code, even when it works, it usually have unneeded steps and other
> caveats that require human interaction to clean it up and fix.
> 
> I got good results with AI for things like generating unit tests, but
> once tests are generated, still 50%-60% of them fails because AI
> did stupid things, like not counting whitespaces right, and even
> sometimes forgetting parameters and arguments.
> 
> From several aspects, it looks like contact a very junior intern
> that knows a programming language and code really fast, but it has
> no glue about how to generate a production quality level code.
> 
> After dozens of interactions, the code can be used as the bases for
> a senior professional to modify it and have something ready for
> merging.
> 
> The net result is that:
> 
> 1. AI alone doesn't produce a ready-to-merge code;
> 2. Lots of refinement requirements made by humans to shape the code 
>    into something that actually works;
> 3. During AI interaction, human has to intervene several times to
>    avoid AI to hallucinate. Sometimes, it also has to close the
>    chat and open again - or even use a different LLM model when
>    AI can't converge;
> 4. At best scenario, human still needs to read the code and carefully
>    modify for it to make sense; at worse, it has to write its own
>    code, eventually using some suggestions from the AI hallucination.

And the point is -- this all has now been much more easily available, and 
the increase pressure on maintainers is inevitable (pretty much everybody 
is now capable of submitting OK-ish looking code), so the 
submitter/maintainer ratio might become very unfair/unbalanced.

Hence the need (I believe) to require proper annotation, even with all the 
legal aspect aside.

Thanks,

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs