Generative AI / LLM Policy

June 3, 2026 · View on GitHub

We appreciate that we can't realistically police how you author your pull requests, which includes whether you employ large-language model (LLM)-based development tools. So, we don't.

However, due to both legal and human reasons, we have to establish boundaries.

Caution

TL;DR:

  • We take the responsibility for this project very seriously and we expect you to take your responsibility for your contributions seriously, too. This used to be a given, but it changed now that a pull request is just one prompt away.

  • Every contribution has to be backed by a human who unequivocally owns the copyright for all changes. No LLM bots in Co-authored-by:s.

  • Absolutely no unsupervised agentic tools like OpenClaw.

By submitting a pull request, you certify that:

  • You are the author of the contribution or have the legal right to submit it.
  • You either hold the copyright to the changes or have explicit legal authorization to contribute them under this project's license.
  • You understand the code.
  • You accept full responsibility for it.

There is ongoing legal uncertainty regarding the copyright status of LLM-generated works and their provenance. Since we do not have a formal Contributor License Agreement (CLA), you retain your copyright to your changes to this project.

Therefore, allowing contributions by LLMs has unpredictable consequences for the copyright status of this project – even when leaving aside possible copyright violations due to plagiarism.

Human

We take responsibility to our users seriously. Every code change is reviewed manually before merging because it's our responsibility to keep the project stable.

Please understand that by opening low-quality pull requests you're not helping anyone. Worse, you're poisoning the open source ecosystem that was precarious even before the arrival of LLM tools. Having to wade through plausible-looking-but-low-quality pull requests and trying to determine which ones are legit is extremely demoralizing and has already burned out many good maintainers.

Put bluntly, we have no time or interest to become part of your vibe coding loop where you drop LLM slop at our door, we spend time and energy to review it, and you just feed it back into the LLM for another iteration.

This dynamic is especially pernicious because it poisons the well for mentoring new contributors which we are committed to.

Summary

In practice, this means:

  • Pull requests that have an LLM product listed as co-author can't be merged and will be closed without further discussion. We cannot risk the copyright status of this project.

    If you used LLM tools during development, you may still submit – but you must remove any LLM co-author tags and take full ownership of every line.

  • By submitting a pull request, you take full technical and legal responsibility for the contents of the pull request and promise that you hold the copyright for the changes submitted.

    "An LLM wrote it" is not an acceptable response to questions or critique. If you cannot explain and defend the changes you submit, do not submit them and open a high-quality bug report/feature request instead.

  • Do not post LLM-generated review comments – we can prompt LLMs ourselves should we desire their wisdom. Do not post summaries unless you've fact-checked them and take responsibility for 100% of their content. Remember that all LLM output looks plausible. When using these tools, it's your responsibility to ensure that it's also correct and has a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio.

Attribution

This AI policy is based on attrs' AI_POLICY.md.