Re: [PATCH 1/4] docs/devel: introduce a new policy on AI-generated contributions

[Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org>]

Thanks for the review!

On 9/2/26 03:38, Alistair Francis wrote:
>> +Prohibited use of AI
>> +''''''''''''''''''''
>> +
>> +The following items **MUST** be written by humans:
>> +
>> +- cover letters and commit messages
>> +
>> +- responses to reviewer comments
>> +
>> +- issue descriptions or comments
>> +
>> +Light copy editing of human-written text with an AI is allowed.
> 
> What about translations? Not everyone can write English well and I see
> translations being useful.

Difficult choice.  I can see that it's useful, but we've never been 
hardliners for English grammar, and translation may cause agent-ese to 
slip in.  I am not a native speaker but I wouldn't use this possibility, 
so I'm not the best person to decide.

That said, if somebody asked the agent for help translating, it would 
probably do it anyway.

>> - small LLM-assisted bugfixes (as a rule of thumb, below 10 lines of
>>   code) are allowed with disclosure.  Splitting a submission in multiple
>>   parts is **not** a valid way to bypass this rule; repeated, frequent
>>   posting of such fixes must follow the rule for full contributions.
> 
> Maybe add something like (fell free to edit):
> 
> """
> When submitting LLM generated bug fixes the human should clearly
> describe what the bug is, how it is triggered and how it impacted them.
> The idea her is that we don't want people pointing an LLM at the source
> and generating "bug fixes" for issues that users aren't seeing. This
> can result in reviewer burnout.

I left that out because the document is already very long.  My suspicion 
is that the agent is able to infer most of it thanks to the 
"understanding" part of AGENTS.md, and reviewer burnout is covered by 
forbidding repeated posting of this kind of fix.

>> - use of LLMs to help generating parts of a larger patch---a test
>>   case, a parser, boilerplate code for a new API, a tool to help
>>   performing mechanical changes, etc. These are generally allowed, but
>>   disclosure is recommended.
> 
> disclosure should just be required here as well.

I think it depends in general.  Sometimes there is really just one way 
to write code in this bucket, and in that case disclosure is superfluous 
(see for example the "impl<T: ToMigrationState> ToMigrationState for 
Mutex<T>" block in rust/migration/src/migratable.rs).  The AGENTS.md 
file will cause the agent to recommend it anyway.

Paolo