How to contribute

May 28, 2026 · View on GitHub

We'd love to accept your patches and contributions to this project. However, please note our current temporary policy below.

Important

Temporary Pause on External Contributions

AX is currently undergoing a significant architectural redesign, and the codebase is highly unstable. To ensure we can focus on stabilizing the core framework, we are temporarily pausing the acceptance of external Pull Requests.

Please do not open Pull Requests at this time, as they are likely to conflict with ongoing changes and may be closed without review. Instead, we encourage you to:

  • Open an Issue to propose feature requests or report bugs.
  • Join discussions on existing issues to share your feedback.

We will update this guide once the core architecture stabilizes and we are ready to welcome contributions again. Thank you for your understanding and patience!

Before you begin

Sign our Contributor License Agreement

All submissions to this project need to follow Google’s Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which covers any original work of authorship included in the submission. This doesn't prohibit the use of coding assistance tools, including tool-, AI-, or machine-generated code, as long as these submissions abide by the CLA's requirements.

You (or your employer) retain the copyright to your contribution; this simply gives us permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of the project.

If you or your current employer have already signed the Google CLA (even if it was for a different project), you probably don't need to do it again.

Visit https://cla.developers.google.com/ to see your current agreements or to sign a new one.

Review our community guidelines

This project follows Google's Open Source Community Guidelines.

Code reviews

All submissions, including submissions by project members, require review. We use GitHub pull requests for this purpose. Consult GitHub Help for more information on using pull requests.

Contribution workflow

Generate Protobuf Code

make proto

Run Tests

make test

Run remote agent

make run-remote

Install the ax CLI

make install

Ensure that GOPATH/binisinyourGOPATH/bin is in your PATH.

export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin"

If you have the GOBIN environment variable set, it will be installed there instead. Make sure the installation directory is in your $PATH.

To add the default location to your PATH for the current session, run:

export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin"

Creating a pull request

First, clone the repo:

git clone git@github.com:google/ax.git

If you already have cloned the repo locally, make sure that your main branch is up to date:

git checkout main
git pull -q -r origin main

Check a new feature branch:

git checkout -b my-feature

Make edits to files, and test them locally. Add the changes (e.g. git add .) to stage. Commit the changes once you staged the changes:

git commit -m "Describe he changes made"

Push the branch to the origin and open a pull request:

git push origin my-feature

Visit https://github.com/google/ax to open a pull request.

Troubleshooting

Outdated table schema

AX is still under heavy development and the database schema is not yet stable. If you encounter errors related to outdated table schemas, you can reset the database by deleting the eventlog directory.

An example:

ax exec --input "hello"

Error: error creating controller: failed to create event log: sqlite_eventlog: create index exec_checkpoint_id: SQL logic error: no such column: checkpoint_id (1)

Delete the eventlog directory and try again.

rm -rf ./eventlog