// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Linux May Get a New Home for AI Agent Skills
A Fixes tag in a kernel patch points to the commit that introduced the bug, but the last commit to touch a buggy line may only have moved the code to a new file.
Sasha Levin, who co-maintains the stable and long-term support kernel trees, wants AI coding assistants to verify which commit introduced a bug before assigning it a Fixes: tag.
His two-patch series went to the workflows and ksummit mailing lists last week, where he has proposed a new agents directory in the kernel tree to hold the skill that does it.
The first patch adds an agents/ directory at the top of the kernel source tree for skills, prompts, and other resources meant for coding assistants. It also adds a MAINTAINERS entry covering the directory.
Each skill gets its own folder under agents/skills/, with a SKILL.md file as its entry point, written in the Agent Skills format.
Assistants are told to read a resource directly from its path in the repository, and links inside a skill are relative to that skill's folder. A new section in the kernel's coding assistants document is meant to describe this layout.
The find-fixes skill, which arrives with the second patch, would be the first one in the directory.
Levin says the series traces back to a question from Ted Ts'o about incorrect tags in stable tree work. He pointed to LLM workflows that help find the right commit.
Ted later explained that the request came from a talk with Hannes Reinecke, who estimated that 15 to 20 percent of Fixes tags are wrong.
That matters beyond bookkeeping, since the tag is how stable maintainers and distributions work out which kernels need a given fix. A wrong one can send a fix to the wrong branches or leave a bug unpatched.