Coding Agent Attribution in Open Source

I learned about git commit footers AKA git trailers, a few years back, from engineers recommending it as a structured commit information strategy similar to conventional commits. None of the jobs I've worked have cared to track information at that level of detail. I think the code review tool at Amazon would stick the review URL as a footer, but that was as far as I've ever seen this feature used on the job. Xe Iaso's recent blog post has drawn my attention to a new usage similar to the code review one — labeling commits as Assisted-by a coding agent.

Apparently Fedora's AI Assisted Contribution Policy requires adding a footer like Assisted-by: ChatGPTv5 if a coding agent assisted in writing the commit. I looked around and found the OpenInfra Foundation adopted Assisted-by and the Apache Software Foundation adopted the similar Generated-by. I think this is a really reasonable request from these organizations, and easily automated since git has built-in support for footers:

git commit --message "Number Five is alive!" \
           --trailer "Assisted-by: Johnny 5"