Commit 78d979db6c ("docs: add AI Coding Assistants documentation") asked
contributors to add an Assisted-by tag to patches developed with help from an
LLM, and commit 816d9992d9 ("coding-assistants: simplify attribution") later
reduced the tag to "Assisted-by: LLM".
A proposal to drop the tag was turned down in July [1]. The main argument for
keeping it was that maintainers wanted a signal that a patch was LLM-assisted,
so that they could review it accordingly.
The tag came up again at the 2026 Maintainers Summit [2]. Roughly 10% of the
18,533 non-merge commits in 7.3 through -rc7 carry an Assisted-by tag, while
actual LLM use is far more widespread. Some contributors do not know about the
rule, others leave the tag off on purpose, and few maintainers ask about it. As
a result, the tag does not provide the signal it was kept for: its absence says
nothing about how a patch was made, and for developers who use these tools for
almost everything, its presence says little more. The choice was between
finding a way to enforce the requirement and dropping it, and there was a
strong, though not unanimous, consensus in the room to drop it. Greg
Kroah-Hartman, who argued for keeping the tag in July, supports removing it now
[3].
Maintainers do still want to know how a patch was created, but the view at the
Summit was that this belongs in the cover letter, where it can describe how the
tools were used, rather than in the changelog.
Documentation/process/generated-content.rst already asks contributors to be
transparent about tool use and is not changed here. The rules on the DCO and on
the submitter's responsibility for the patch stay as they are.
Remove the Assisted-by sections from coding-assistants.rst,
submitting-patches.rst, and the Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Traditional
Chinese translations, and drop the handling of the tag from checkpatch.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/workflows/2026070224-unholy-commode-cf45@gregkh/
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/1099594/
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/all/2026101327-cupid-legal-6cf6@gregkh/
Acked-by: Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) <ljs@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <kees@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jori Koolstra <jkoolstra@xs4all.nl>
Acked-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzk@kernel.org>
Acked-by: SJ Park <sj@kernel.org>
Acked-by: David Hildenbrand (Arm) <david@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Daniel Pereira <danielmaraboo@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org>
Acked-by: Weijie Yuan <wy@wyuan.org>
Reviewed-by: Miguel Ojeda <ojeda@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Message-ID: <20261013121501.3738437-1-sashal@kernel.org>
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