The Linux kernel community has given up asking contributors whether they used AI tools. Sasha Levin, a kernel developer and engineer at Nvidia, announced on the mailing list that the Maintainers Summit had reached a consensus to deprecate the Assisted-by tag and remove the documentation requiring it. This rule asked anyone using an advanced coding tool to create a patch to flag it with this tag in the commit message. Proposed in July 2025, it had been added to the documentation in January 2026, shortly after Linus Torvalds said he was fairly favorable toward vibe coding as an entry point into programming, while remaining skeptical about maintainability.
According to the article, attribution raised little question as long as the generated code was obviously bad; for about a year now, agents have been producing code of acceptable quality for the kernel. In August, at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit in South Korea, Greg Kroah-Hartman argued that LLMs are good enough to find bugs, since they recognize patterns and code is nothing but patterns in a given format. Concerns remain: undetected errors, accountability, reproduction of protected code. A stigma also persists toward those who don't understand the code they obtained via prompting. Vendors themselves diverge: Claude adds a provenance note by default, Codex does not.
Jeff Layton, of Red Hat, justified the reversal with three arguments: not everyone follows the rule, it provides free advertising for proprietary LLM vendors, and the value of collecting this information is not established. Laurent Pinchart, founder of Ideas on Board, refuses to drop the tag without another disclosure mechanism: it's about stating what is expected, and the fact that some cheat has never stopped the rejection of their contributions.
Linus Torvalds replied that this was not about expectations but personal hang-ups. He ironically proposes banning compilers, on the grounds that only assembly would prove understanding of the machine, then editors for commit messages, and calls this kind of rule absurd. The project will not make rules banning a tool for a given task. His expectation is that everyone does their best and understands what they are doing, which depends little on the tools used; and the people he respects do not shy away from new tools.