Proposal: Adopt Organization-wide AI Contribution Policy and PR Templates

[Vaishnav88sk]

Background

As AI coding assistants (Copilot, Cursor, Claude, etc.) and autonomous agents become more prevalent, open-source maintainers are increasingly burdened by low-effort or poorly understood AI-generated pull requests.

Major open-source ecosystems (like Kubernetes) have recently introduced formal AI Guidance to ensure transparency and accountability. Following discussions in microcks/microcks#2202, we agreed to establish a global AI policy for the Microcks organization.

Proposal

I propose we establish an organization-wide AI Contribution Policy to protect maintainer time and ensure code quality.

Specifically, we should update CONTRIBUTING.md and our PR Templates to enforce the following:

1. Explicit Disclosure: Require contributors to explicitly disclose AI usage in their PR descriptions.
2. Quality Control: Clarify that large, entirely AI-generated PRs or AI-generated commit messages are discouraged.
3. Human Accountability: Establish a rule that contributors must understand their code. If a reviewer asks a question about an implementation and the contributor cannot explain it, the PR may be closed.
4. No AI Auto-replies: Prohibit the use of AI tools to auto-reply to maintainer review comments.
5. PR Checklist: Add a checklist item to the default PR template (e.g., [ ] If AI tools were used to assist in writing this PR, I have disclosed it in the description.)

Establishing these boundaries now will ensure that as AI tools get more popular, the quality of contributions remains high across all Microcks repositories.

[Vaishnav88sk]

cc:
@lbroudoux
@yada

[github-actions]

👋 @Vaishnav88sk

Welcome to the Microcks community! 💖

Thanks and congrats 🎉 for opening your first issue here! Be sure to follow the issue template or please update it accordingly.

📢 If you're using Microcks in your organization, please add your company name to this list. 🙏 It really helps the project to gain momentum and credibility. It's a small contribution back to the project with a big impact.

If you need to know why and how to add yourself to the list, please read the blog post "Join the Microcks Adopters list and Empower the vibrant open source Community 🙌"

Hope you have a great time there!

🌟 ~~~~~~~~~ 🌟

📢 If you like Microcks, please ⭐ star ⭐ our repo to support it!

🙏 It really helps the project to gain momentum and credibility. It's a small contribution back to the project with a big impact.

[yada]

Thanks for opening this issue and bringing up the topic. Let's identify and agree on the key points we want to include, as well as the references we consider most relevant as sources of inspiration.

[yada]

Ex and inspiration from (source: cncf/foundation#1285):

• https://github.com/cilium/community/blob/main/AI-POLICY.md
• https://github.com/strimzi/governance/blob/main/AI_POLICY.md

Let's create our draft based on Cilium and your bullet points above; the goal is to make it simple and straight to the point.
@Vaishnav88sk, it seems you want to contribute to it ;) Looking forward to iterating on your PR; otherwise, let me know, and I'll create one.