Hello Marco, thanks for raising this up, anything that helps here is welcome, especially from users that actively use these AI tools but keeping and growing their own brainz and skillz :-)
Short instructions that we usually repeat over and over on the PRs are good starting point, Inviolables and Contributing Guide as the first documents to read and follow, respect PR and commit templates, build and runtime test logs needs to be attached, local account CI testing before PR is raised and starts our upstream CI, etc etc :-) -- CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info On Sat, Nov 7, 2026 at 2:13 PM Marco C. <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello all, > > I know that many of you do not like AI-generated contributions. This > proposal does not ask anyone to like them or to use them. Its goal is to > make the AI-assisted work that already reaches us better, so that it costs > reviewers less time. > > Since 1 August 2026, 2007 of the 2954 non-merge commits on > master have an Assisted-by line, from 84 authors (many of them are mine, so > I know these tools and their faults well). AI-assisted work is not coming: > it is here, and it will grow. > > Many of these contributions break rules that we already have. Examples > from the last weeks: > > - test logs in a PR that the named test program cannot print; > - PR descriptions that describe an older version of the code; > - 349 of the 2005 commits with both lines have Assisted-by below > Signed-off-by (CONTRIBUTING.md 1.5 says above); > - fixes with no evidence of the bug and no test; > - code that CI does not compile, because no CI configuration enables it; > - an agent configuration file with an authorization header committed to > master (#21540 removes it). > > Each of these costs a reviewer time. The agents do not do this on purpose: > master (#21540 removes it). > > Each of these costs a reviewer time. The agents do not do this on purpose: > they do not know our rules, because nothing in the repository tells them. > > Many coding agents read a file named AGENTS.md at the top of a repository > before they change anything; the others read it when the user tells them > to. I propose that we add one. The draft is here: > > https://github.com/casaroli/nuttx/blob/agents-md-v2/AGENTS.md > > What it is: > > - It restates CONTRIBUTING.md and INVIOLABLES.md as > steps that an agent can follow: reproduce the bug first, never invent > logs, say what was not tested, add a regression test in nuttx-apps, > check the documentation, the size of small configurations, Make/CMake > parity and breaking changes, run checkpatch, use depends-on correctly. > - It keeps the human responsible. The agent must never add > Signed-off-by. It must stop and ask the author to read the change and > sign it off before anything is pushed. > - Human contributors can ignore it. You already follow these rules, and > they stay in CONTRIBUTING.md. > - It gives reviewers something to point to: "read AGENTS.md" is shorter > than the same review comment for the tenth time. > > It does not say that AI contributions are welcome, and it does not lower > any requirement. If anything, it asks agents for more evidence than > many human PRs give today. > > Please send comments on the content or on the idea. If there is > agreement, I will open a PR with the file, and change it with your > comments. > > Best regards, > Marco Casaroli
