[Development] AI-generated contributions to Qt

[Vlad Zahorodnii]

Hi,

On 7/21/26 3:43 PM, Shawn Rutledge via Development wrote:
>
>     >> As a reviewer I try to find out quickly whether AI was used as
>     a tool
>     >> to enhance productivity, while the developer owns the code.
>     >
>     > I think anything not a small patch - medium and large patches,
>     should be
>     > clearly identified in the commit message, that it was developed in
>     > conjunction with a machine or somesuch.
>
>     I'm not convinced this would be useful. Such a disclaimer would just
>     serve as excuse should the developer not fully understand / own the
>     generated code, which is the situation we should avoid. I'm also not
>     interested to read in commit messages which IDE, text editor,
>     operating
>     system was involved in creating the patch. ;)
>
> That's not an apt comparison IMO.
>
> If you used some code generator (from some IDL, protocol 
> specification, introspection or whatever), you would usually say that 
> it's generated code.  Sometimes that's considered a build artifact to 
> be regenerated every time; sometimes we check it in with a comment 
> about how it was generated, because we don't expect that it needs to 
> be regenerated very often.
>
> It seems to me the Linux community is setting the standard here:
> https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html
> They say the tagline should be Assisted-by: ...
>
> Whereas Claude is doing this by default:
> Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply at anthropic.com>
>
> That does look too much like an ad for my taste, and co-author is a 
> bit stronger word than assistant; but, maybe we'll appreciate the 
> model version when we look back later: ah yeah that 4.8 version was 
> not so smart, it made this typical kind of mistake that we know how to 
> correct now, or something like that.

FWIW that's the KDE position. Assisted-by and Co-authored-by act more 
like an ad here. You typically don't put Developed-with: Visual Studio 
Code, etc.

Regards,
Vlad

> I think it's a matter of honesty to tell when an AI agent has done a 
> good part of the work, just as you would add Done-with: when a 
> colleague or collaborator has done a substantial portion of it.  It's 
> not a matter of abdicating responsibility, it's "show your work" the 
> way every academic expects.  Give credit where credit is due, and also 
> show the line of reasoning that led to the code being the way it is.  
> IMO the reason we write long commit messages is so that "git blame" 
> can answer questions later on: why is this code the way it is?  What 
> frame of mind did the person who wrote this have?  What bug was he or 
> she trying to fix?  AIs often explain their thinking more thoroughly, 
> in commit messages and comments.  OTOH so far they do not return the 
> favor of telling which human sources inspired any particular output.  
> It would be nice if they did, but they apparently don't know how to 
> remember the sources that they learned from.
>
>
> Confidential
>
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