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docs(dco): let maintainer-operated automation sign off - #11850
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The AI-assistant policy says an AI agent must never add a Signed-off-by trailer, because only a human can certify the DCO. That is right for the case it was written for: an assistant helping a contributor who then signs off themselves. It does not fit automation a maintainer runs. Those pull requests have no human submitter, so nothing ever signs and the DCO check blocks them permanently. Sixty-one open pull requests from the maintenance bot are in exactly that state, every one of them correctly following the documented rule. Carve out the case: automation a maintainer operates signs off with that maintainer's identity. The maintainer certifies the DCO, as they do for a commit they typed by hand, because they configured the automation, own its output, and take responsibility on merge. The Assisted-by trailer still records that a model wrote the code, so provenance is unchanged. Keep the exception narrow. An assistant helping an outside contributor still must not sign off, and a bot must not sign for anyone but its operator, including on a contributor's branch it pushes to. Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
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The problem
61 open pull requests from
localai-org-maint-botfail DCO. Every one of them is correctly following the documented policy.AGENTS.mdsays:and
.agents/ai-coding-assistants.md:38says:The bot obeys both. It emits
Assisted-by: Codex:gpt-5in exactly the documented format and adds neitherSigned-off-bynorCo-Authored-By.The rule was written for an AI assistant helping a human contributor, who then signs off themselves. It does not fit automation a maintainer runs, because those pull requests have no human submitter to sign. Applied literally there, nothing ever signs, and DCO blocks the PR permanently. That is not a bug in the bot; it is a gap in the policy.
The change
Automation a maintainer operates signs off with that maintainer's identity:
This is not the AI certifying the DCO. The maintainer is, exactly as they do for a commit they typed by hand: they configured the automation, they own its output, and they take responsibility for it on merge. The
Assisted-bytrailer still records that a model produced the code, so the provenance trail is unchanged.The exception is deliberately narrow and does not widen the rule for anyone else:
That last point is not hypothetical: #11677 is currently blocked because the bot pushed a commit onto a contributor's branch, and the contributor rightly refuses to sign someone else's commit.
Files
All four policy surfaces, kept consistent:
AGENTS.md(CLAUDE.mdis a symlink to it).agents/ai-coding-assistants.mddocs/content/reference/ai-coding-assistants.mdCONTRIBUTING.mdFollow-up, not in this PR
The generator itself needs to start emitting the trailer. It does not live in this repository (no crontab entry, no systemd timer, nothing in
.github/workflows), and the evidence is that it reads these policy files for its rules, so this change is what it should pick up. The 61 already-open PRs each still need a sign-off added to their existing commits.🤖 Generated with Claude Code
https://claude.ai/code/session_01UxkheFa72CEpeEJbijyjxe