Linux Kernel Drops Assisted-by Tag Requirement for LLM Commits

The Linux Kernel project has decided to fully drop the requirement to mark LLM-assisted commits with the Assisted-by tag. It has also secured budget to use Meta's LLMs for reviewing patches and for creating and editing commit messages, according to Hackaday.

A bot named Sashiko has been introduced to handle code reviews for the Linux Kernel project. Multiple frontier models are run on each patch to try to weed out confabulations.

The change follows a period in which the project has been adapting to LLM-based tooling, as covered in earlier reports. In April, the Linux Kernel project was dealing with an influx of code created using LLM-based coding assistants.

In a July LKML post, Linux creator and maintainer Linus Torvalds defended the decision to use LLMs. In an August follow-up post, Linux kernel maintainer Jakub Kicinski stated that budget had been secured for using Meta's LLMs.