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Docs/ai contribution policy

Apache Magpie — expectations for AI-assisted contributions

This document states what Apache Magpie expects from AI-assisted contributions. The contributor-to-committer and contributor-nomination skills read it through automated_contribution_expectations, and pr-management-code-review links to it. It restates the ASF Generative Tooling Guidance for this project and adds the project’s own norms from CONTRIBUTING.md → Authoring with an agent. Where this file and the ASF guidance differ, the ASF guidance wins.

1. AI-assisted contributions are welcome

Most contributions to Apache Magpie are authored with a coding agent. Using one is neither a negative nor a positive signal in itself. What is assessed is the contribution and the contributor’s ownership of it.

2. Licensing conditions (ASF guidance, #include-in-contributions)

A contribution that includes AI-generated content is acceptable only when:

  1. The tool’s terms are compatible. The tool’s terms and conditions place no restriction on use of the output that is inconsistent with the Open Source Definition.
  2. No incompatible third-party material. At least one holds: the output is not copyrightable, it contains no third-party material, or any third-party material is used with permission (for example under a compatible open-source licence).
  3. Reasonable certainty. The contributor has reasonable certainty that condition 2 is met (see ASF #handling-references). Third-party material that is identified follows the ASF 3rd Party Licensing Policy.

3. Disclosure

  1. Commit trailer. AI-assisted commits carry a Generated-by: <tool and version> trailer, as the ASF guidance recommends and as this project’s commit-attribution.toml (convention = "generated-by") requires. A Co-Authored-By: trailer naming an AI tool is not acceptable: the tool is not an author.
  2. PR description. The PR body states that generative AI was used, via the Gen-AI disclosure block that gh pr create --web pre-fills.
  3. Public content. Text published on a public surface (a PR comment, an issue, a mailing-list post) is either reviewed by the contributor before it is posted or labelled as AI-generated (ASF #what-about-publishing-ai-generated-content-publicly).

4. Human ownership and review

  1. The contributor is the author. They have read every line of the diff, can explain it, and answer review questions themselves rather than relaying them to the agent.
  2. Verification before review. prek run --all-files, the affected package’s tests, and — for a skill change — the affected eval suite are run before review is requested.
  3. Review comments carry the reviewer’s own judgement. A comment that only restates the PR description, the diff, or earlier comments adds no review signal.
  4. Maintainer pushback is addressed, not regenerated. A contribution that drew pushback as looking generated or unreviewed is fixed by the contributor engaging with the feedback, not by resubmitting a fresh generation.

5. What this policy does not do

It does not approve or forbid particular tools: the ASF deliberately keeps no approved-tools list (ASF #approved-tools-list). If a representation made under section 2 later proves inaccurate, the contributor notifies legal-private@apache.org, as the ASF guidance requires.

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