Observed Signal · Jul 27, 2026 · Technical Release · Source: DEV Community · Impact: 1/5 · Sentiment: Neutral
Git Badge Counts AI Contribution in Commits
A developer created two open-source tools to record and report AI contributions in git history: rai-lint, a commit-time linter that enforces Responsible AI (RAI) attribution footers, and rai-commit-badge, a GitHub Action that scores those footers (weighted by lines changed) and publishes a Shields.io badge showing the percentage of code attributed to AI since the earliest footer. The article explains the footer vocabulary (Authored-by, Assisted-by, Generated-by, etc.), the numeric weights applied to each trailer, how the badge's time-window works, and references similar conventions and policies from the Linux kernel, Fedora, LLVM, Artsy, and an IETF Internet-Draft. The page was published on 2026-07-27.
Developer tooling for AI attribution improves transparency and reproducibility but is a niche technical release with limited immediate impact on the broader AdTech/MarTech industry.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- The author built rai-lint, a linter that enforces Responsible AI (RAI) attribution footers on commits.
- The author built rai-commit-badge, a GitHub Action that reads RAI attribution footers, weights them by lines changed, and publishes a Shields.io badge showing percent AI contribution.
- The scorer uses a fixed weighting scale for trailers (example weights: Authored-by=0.00, Commit-generated-by=0.05, Assisted-by=0.25, Co-authored-by=0.50, Generated-by=0.90) and caps attribution at 0.90.
- The article cites similar trailer conventions or policies from the Linux kernel, Fedora, and LLVM, and references an Artsy RFC and an IETF Internet-Draft on identity-attributed commits.
- The badge displays a 'since' window starting at the earliest detected RAI footer (month precision) and the workflow opens or updates a single PR containing the README change.
Connected Companies & Entities
1 Entity mapped“A GitHub Action that scores RAI attribution footers and publishes a shields.io badge....”
Ontology Mapping & Concepts
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