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

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 10:20:22AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.

> 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.

Agreed with the concept. Yet, asking AI to implement a quick sort routine
which is widely documented on several textbooks - or some other very common
algorithm with dozens of GPLv2 (and even public domain) code examples
is probably fine. Now, if one asks AI to implement the very latest fancy
sort algorithm from most recent published papers, then this is problematic.

Thanks,
Mauro