Hi Martijn and everyone, Thanks for driving this discussion! It's great to see the Flink community getting ahead of this topic. +1 from me on the proposal. I wanted to share some context from my work at AWS, where we've been investing in exactly this space: making Apache Flink more accessible to AI tooling, specifically for end users building Flink applications.
We recently open-sourced an Agent Skill [5] for Apache Flink as part of the Agent Toolkit for AWS [1]. This skill provides AI coding agents with deep, structured context about developing applications on Managed Service for Apache Flink. It covers many of the challenging aspects of Flink development that I support customers with day in and day out, including core building blocks like dependency management and basic configurations, to best practices like operator UIDs and resource management, to operations best practices like monitoring and testing approaches, as well as specific use cases like Flink 1.x to 2.x migrations, Iceberg sinks, CDC sources, and so on. It's designed to be installed manually or discovered automatically by MCP documentation search tools (via the AWS MCP server [2]), which also search AWS documentation and blog content relevant to user prompts. This builds on our v1 release [3], which took a similar "steering files" approach to giving AI agents project-specific context — conceptually very close to what AGENTS.md does. That v1 will be deprecated in favor of the Agent Toolkit release, but the experience we gained from it directly informs our thinking here. We also published a blog post [4] demonstrating how this skill can be used in practice both for creating new Flink projects from scratch and for analyzing existing applications for things like Flink 1.x to 2.x migrations, performance analysis, and identifying anti-patterns. We're open-sourcing all of this because we want to share this approach (Agent Skills + Documentation via MCP) and content (the actual Flink Skill [1]) with the broader Flink community. We believe this kind of structured, agent-consumable project context is valuable for the entire Flink community, both in and outside of AWS, and the Agent Skills [5] framework specifically provides a great reusable open-source standard for this type of agentic development challenge. I think there's an opportunity to align on a shared approach here. The work we've done on the "consumer" side (helping users build Flink apps) and what this thread proposes on the "contributor" side (helping developers contribute to Flink) are two faces of the same coin. If the community is interested, we'd love to collaborate on ensuring these efforts are complementary. Happy to discuss further or answer any questions about the approach we've taken. Best regards, Mazrim [1] https://github.com/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws/tree/main/skills/specialized-skills/analytics-skills/developing-applications-on-managed-service-for-apache-flink [2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/agent-toolkit/latest/userguide/getting-started-aws-mcp-server.html [3] https://github.com/awslabs/managed-service-for-apache-flink-agent-steering-files [4] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/build-streaming-applications-on-amazon-managed-service-for-apache-flink-with-ai-assisted-guidance/ [5] https://agentskills.io/home On 2026/03/13 01:50:12 Leonard Xu wrote: > Hi Martijn, > > Thanks for kicking off this discussion. I've been thinking along similar > lines recently, so you have a +1 from me on this proposal. > > I also have a suggestion regarding activity on the users' mailing list. Could > we consider introducing an AI agent to help answer users' questions? I've > noticed that many inquiries on user@flink currently go unanswered, yet most > of them could be effectively addressed by an agent. > > > Best, > Leonard > > > 2026 3月 13 05:03，Martijn Visser <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> > > 写道： > > > > Hi all, > > > > I'd like to start a discussion about how the Flink community should handle > > AI-assisted contributions and how we can make the Flink codebase more > > accessible to AI tooling. > > > > The ASF has published guidance on generative AI tooling [1], and several > > Apache projects have already adopted project-specific guidelines on top of > > that. I think Flink should too. > > > > The most comprehensive example I've seen is Apache Airflow. They've added > > an AGENTS.md [2] with instructions for AI coding agents, including PR > > templates with an AI disclosure checkbox, a self-review checklist, and the > > Generated-by: commit message token that the ASF guidance recommends. Apache > > Iceberg recently adopted AI contribution guidelines [3] focused on > > contributor accountability: you must be able to debug, explain, and own the > > changes. Other projects like Paimon [4], Mahout [5], and Ozone [6] have > > adopted similar policies. > > > > I'd like to propose the following for Flink: > > > > 1. Adopt contribution guidelines for AI-assisted PRs. Contributors must > > disclose when AI tooling was used (using Generated-by: <Tool Name and > > Version> in the commit message), and must be able to explain and take > > ownership of all changes. AI-generated code is held to the same review > > standards as human-written code. > > 2. Add AGENTS.md files to the Flink repository. AGENTS.md [7] is a > > convention for giving AI coding agents project-specific context. It can > > contain information like build instructions, test commands, coding > > conventions, commit message format. I think we should add one at the root > > of apache/flink. > > 3. Add module-level context for AI tooling. This is where I think we can > > take a step forward. Each Flink module (e.g. flink-streaming-java, > > flink-table-planner, flink-clients) would benefit from its own AGENTS.md > > explaining the module's role, key abstractions, testing patterns, and > > common pitfalls. This also serves as architectural documentation that helps > > human contributors. > > > > I'm looking forward to hearing what others think about this. > > > > Best regards, > > > > Martijn > > > > [1] https://www.apache.org/legal/generative-tooling.html > > [2] https://github.com/apache/airflow/blob/main/AGENTS.md > > [3] > > https://iceberg.apache.org/contribute/#guidelines-for-ai-assisted-contributions > > [4] > > https://github.com/apache/paimon/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md?plain=1#L22 > > [5] > > https://github.com/apache/mahout/blob/main/docs/community/pr-policy-and-review-guidelines.md > > [6] > > https://github.com/apache/ozone-site/blob/master/src/pages/release-notes/2.0.0.md?plain=1#L408 > > [7] https://agents.md/ > >
