Re: [RFC PATCH 1/1] SubmittingPatches: allow responsible AI assistance

On 2026-10-08 at 04:49:27, Scott Chacon wrote:

I'm in agreement with most of those policies. I'm just not in agreement that we should accept LLM-generated contributions and that document doesn't say we should.

What it does say is that we shouldn't shun people who submit LLM-generated contributions even if that violates our policies, and I think we've respected that. Every time this comes up—and it comes up more often than it should, given that we have a documented policy and that people should know to look for one—we've handled this graciously. As far as I know, nobody has been blocked or excluded for having sent an LLM-generated patch to Git and we usually explain the policy in a calm, rational way.

Section 8 says we should avoid jumping to legal conclusions. I agree; I have said consistently on the list that one of the reasons we should reject LLM-generated contributions is because the legal status is unclear. I have strong views that LLMs are unethical because of the way they've been trained and the lack of credit, among other reasons, but I have been very clear that the legality is uncertain.

The final thing that it says that kind of supports your argument is §11. However, it's not the case that accepting LLM-generated contributions would massively accelerate improvements to our codebase. Git has a reputation for high quality and we perform thorough reviews. Those are already a bottleneck for us even with only human-generated code and welcoming LLM-generated code and documentation would submerge us under a deluge of patches. As we discussed at the Contributor's Summit, we're already underwater on the security list due to the flood of LLM-assisted bug reports, a number of which are of dubious quality, and we shouldn't replicate that on the public list as well.

One thing that supports my argument is that we should support people who "outright reject LLM-gen-AI systems." Because of the way this list works, if we accept LLM-generated code, contributors who don't want to work with that content are going to receive unwanted patches that are CC'd to them and then have to deal with those, whereas in a project like Rust, one can simply block the LLM bots and then never have to deal with that content at all. So I don't think we can honour that term while we allow LLM-generated content unless we change our development approach.

I would also say that we are not obligated to follow SFC's guidance at all. SFC also recommends that we leave GitHub[0], which obviously neither of us are following, nor are most of our contributors, and many people would disagree. Regardless of their guidance, our project can set our own policies and structure as we see fit. QEMU is also an SFC project and has adopted a policy very similar to ours[1], so there is clearly precedent here.

[0] https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/ [1] https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/blob/master/docs/devel/code-provenance.rst?ref_type=heads