RFC: The Binutils and LLM generated patches

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On 2025-10-06 10:29, Nick Clifton wrote:
> When submitting a non-legally-significant LLM generated change, it is
> still necessary to clearly indicate the use of the LLM.  The
> identification should take the form of a line starting with the
> "Generated-By: " prefix which identifies the LLM used and a line
> starting with "LLM-Query: " which shows the query given to the LLM.
> For example:
> 
>    Generated-By: GNU-LLM version 1.0
>    LLM-Query: Create a program to solve all GNU problems

Minor nit: due to the nature of LLMs, the query will likely not result 
in the same output at all times.  I can see why you'd want the query 
though, but maybe also add in a note like so?

```
The LLM-Query needs to be recorded for auditing purposes, but is not 
expected to produce the exact same output due to the non-deterministic 
nature of LLMs.
```

Also maybe, replace LLMs with AI in general?  Or is binutils OK with 
patch submissions from other forms of AI, e.g. a reinforcement learning 
bot that has been trained to spot a buffer overflow?  Such a bot would 
also need code as training data, but it may or may not have the same 
challenges as an LLM model trained on, well, the internet.  You could 
make a distinction (e.g. an AI model that has been trained exclusively 
on data that has a clear copyright and the submitter is legally allowed 
to contribute it to binutils under said license) but that could be 
applied in general to an AI model without singling out LLMs.

If you do that, you could then add a line on LLMs stating that they're 
almost exclusively trained on the entire internet, so they're definitely 
disallowed from contributing any copyrightable content to binutils.

Thanks,
Sid