AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

As a project maintainer, you shouldn't make rules unenforceable rules that you and everyone else know people will flout. Doing so comes makes you seem impotent and diminishes the respect people have for rules in general.

You might argue that by making rules, even futile ones, you at least establish expectations and take a moral stance. Well, you can make a statement without dressing it up as a rule. But you don't get to be sanctimonious that way I guess.

Except you can enforce this rule some of the time. People discover that AI was used or suspect it all the time, and people admit to it after some pressure all the time.

Not every time, but sometimes. The threat of being caught isn't meaningless. You can decide not to play in someone else's walled garden if you want but the least you can do is respect their rules, bare minimum of human decency.

It. doesn't. matter.

The only legitimate reason to make a rule is to produce some outcome. If your rule does not result in that outcome, of what use is the rule?

Will this rule result in people disclosing "AI" (whatever that means) contributions? Will it mitigate some kind of risk to the project? Will it lighten maintainer load?

No. It can't. People are going to use the tools anyway. You can't tell. You can't stop them. The only outcome you'll get out of a rule like this is making people incrementally less honest.

Sometimes you can tell.

> Will it lighten maintainer load?

Yes that is the stated purpose, did you read the linked GitHub comment? The author lays out their points pretty well, you sound unreasonably upset about this. Are you submitting a lot of AI slop PRs or something?

P.S Talking. Like. This. Is. Really. Ineffective. It. Makes. Me. Just. Want. To. Disregard. Your. Point. Out. Of. Hand.

There are plenty of argumentative and opinionated reasons to say it matters, but there is one that can't really be denied - reviewers (and project maintainers, even if they aren't reviewers) are people whose time deserves to be respected.

If this rule discourages low quality PRs or allows reviewers to save time by prioritizing some non-AI-generated PRs, then it certainly seems useful in my opinion.

Unenforceable rules are bad, but if you tweak the rule to always require some sort of authorship statement (e.g. "I wrote this by hand" or "I wrote this with Claude"), then the honor system will mostly achieve the desired goal of calibrating code review effort.

> As a project maintainer, you shouldn't make rules unenforceable rules

Total bullshit. It's totally fine to declare intent.

You are already incapable of verifying / enforcing that a contributor is legally permitted to submit a piece of code as their own creation (Signed-off-by), and do so under the project's license. You won't embark on looking for prior art, for the "actual origin" of the code, whatever. You just make them promise, and then take their word for it.

The utility of the rule is so that you can cheaply nuke non-conforming contributors from orbit when you detect their undisclosed AI use. Vs having to deal with the flood of low quality contributions on a individually reviewed basis.

Except the other way happens too.

You get someone that didn't use AI getting accused of using AI and eventually telling people to screw off and contributing nothing.

You’re basically saying “if a rule can be broken, it will be, therefore rules are useless.”

If someone really wants to commit fraud they’re going to commit fraud. (For example, by not disclosing AI use when a repository requires it.) But if their fraud is discovered, they can still be punished for it, and mitigating actions taken. That’s not nothing, and does actually do a lot to prevent people from engaging in such fraud in the first place.

And if they’re discovered to not be keeping their word, there can be consequences imposed and mitigating actions taken. Rules can’t prevent bad actions 100% of the time, but they can substantially increase the risk of bad actions.

If their work was difficult to distinguish from AI then that sounds like a win too.