Re: [PATCH 2/4] agents: add core development references

[Sasha Levin]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 06:35:28PM +0100, Al Viro wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 12:25:41PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
>
> > Critical Requirements:
> >
> > * License: ALL code MUST be GPL-2.0 only (see COPYING)
> > * Signed-off-by: Agents MUST NOT add Signed-off-by tags
> >   (Only humans can legally certify code submission rights)
> > * Attribution: Agents MUST add Co-developed-by tag:
> >   Co-developed-by: $AGENT_NAME $AGENT_MODEL $AGENT_VERSION
> >   Examples:
> >   - Co-developed-by: Claude claude-3-opus-20240229
> >   - Co-developed-by: GitHub-Copilot GPT-4 v1.0.0
>
>  * for any patch there must be some entity capable of usefully
>    answering questions about that patch.  Legal certification
>    be damned, there must be somebody able to handle active
>    questioning.
>
> And no, it's not the same as with human submitters.  If entity
> A sends a patch to maintainer B, who passes it along and gets
> questions/feedback regarding that patch, B might have to resort
> to passing the questions to A, to confirm their understanding
> of the situation.  And from what I've seen, LLM tend to do
> very badly in such cases.
>
> IOW, defending any agent-originated patch falls entirely upon
> the human "co-developer".  IMO that is a critical requirement.

I agree. Elsewhere in the thread I suggested that a maintainer should be
able to require having tool generated patches come with a Reviewed-by
tag from a "trusted reviewer" (similar to the guidelines we have for
academic researches).

This way you could at least have a human you trust be part of the loop
until you trust the author of those tool generated patches.

--
Thanks,
Sasha