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AI Usage Policy

Contributors can use whatever tools they would like to craft their contributions, but there must be a human in the loop. Contributors must read and review all LLM-generated code or text before they ask other project members to review it. The contributor is always the author and is fully accountable for their contributions. Contributors should be sufficiently confident that the contribution is high enough quality that asking for a review is a good use of scarce maintainer time, and they should be able to answer questions about their work during review.

We expect that new contributors will be less confident in their contributions, and our guidance to them is to start with small contributions that they can fully understand to build confidence. We aspire to be a welcoming community that helps new contributors grow their expertise, but learning involves taking small steps, getting feedback, and iterating. Passing maintainer feedback to an LLM doesn't help anyone grow, and does not sustain our community.

This policy includes, but is not limited to, the following kinds of contributions:

- Code, usually in the form of a pull request
- Issues or security vulnerabilities
- Comments and feedback on pull requests

# Extractive Contributions

The reason for our "human-in-the-loop" contribution policy is that processing patches, PRs, RFCs, and comments is not free – it takes a lot of maintainer time and energy to review those contributions! Sending the unreviewed output of an LLM to open source project maintainers extracts work from them in the form of design and code review, so we call this kind of contribution an "extractive contribution".

# Copyright

Artificial intelligence systems raise many questions around copyright that have yet to be answered. Our policy on AI tools is similar to our copyright policy: Contributors are responsible for ensuring that they have the right to contribute code under the terms of our license, typically meaning that either they, their employer, or their collaborators hold the copyright. Using AI tools to regenerate copyrighted material does not remove the copyright, and contributors are responsible for ensuring that such material does not appear in their contributions. Contributions found to violate this policy will be removed just like any other offending contribution.

# Reference

- LLVM AI Tool Use Policy