A note on AI-assisted contributions

AI tools are fine to use — many of us use them. The bar is simple and it's the same bar that has always applied: you must be able to reproduce and stand behind what you submit.

  • For a bug or security report, that means a minimal reproduction that actually runs against the current release, and identifying the specific documented behavior or invariant you believe is wrong.
  • For a pull request, that means a test that fails before your change and passes after, and that the full CI suite is green.

Reports or PRs that are clearly machine-generated, can't be reproduced, and whose author can't answer follow-up questions will be closed without extended back-and-forth. This isn't hostility toward AI — it's the cost of a maintainer's time. Speculative "there might be a buffer overflow here" reports with no reproduction are the one thing that genuinely drains a small project.

Attribute the assistant

If an AI coding agent helped produce a commit, that commit must carry an Assisted-by: trailer naming the agent and model, following the Linux kernel's coding-assistants guidance. Using an assistant is welcome and encouraged; not disclosing it is not — the attribution is required, not optional.

The format is Assisted-by: AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION [analysis-tools], alongside your own DCO sign-off:

Signed-off-by: Jane Developer <[email protected]>
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-3-opus coccinelle sparse

Use the actual agent and the model version you used (model ids change — record the one in effect for that commit), and append specialised analysis tools if relevant (e.g. coccinelle, sparse). Do not list ordinary tools like git, the compiler, or your editor.

An assistant must never add a Signed-off-by: or Co-developed-by: trailer — only a human can certify the DCO. You, the human submitter, review the change, add your own Signed-off-by:, and take full responsibility for it. In short: Assisted-by: is attribution; Signed-off-by: is accountability — every AI-assisted commit needs both, and they are never the same line.