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

[Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2025, Kees Cook 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".

Thanks, I understand your point.

I, however, don't think I as a maintainer care at all whether the patch 
has been "assisted by" some LLM when it comes to proposing testing 
scanarios and testcases, managing the testing results, yada yada yada.

If the patch author wishes to express that in one way or the other, just a 
freetext form in the commit log is completely fine for me.

I don't think we care about that aspect direcly neither from "maintainer 
workflow" nor legal perspectives (IANAL, of course).

But we do (or should, I believe) care about the actual submitted code 
having been produced by it, for both of the the reasons above.

Thanks,

-- 
Jiri Kosina