[Development] AI-generated contributions to Qt

[Vlad Zahorodnii]

On 7/21/26 4:00 PM, Vlad Zahorodnii wrote:
>
> 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.
>
JIC 
https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Maintainers_and_Contributions#Artificial_Intelligence_Tools 

>
> 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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