Our Policy on AI-Generated Contributions

We've been noticing a trend across open source: an uptick in pull requests that are clearly generated by AI tools with minimal human oversight. This post establishes an official policy for how OTSF projects handle these contributions.

The short version: we want your contributions, not your AI's contributions.

Here's the thing—if we wanted to receive AI-generated pull requests, we'd generate them ourselves. What we're looking for is thoughtful work from developers who understand the code they're submitting and can engage meaningfully with our review process. That's not possible when someone pastes an issue into ChatGPT and submits whatever comes out.

If you do use AI tools to assist your work (and plenty of developers do), take the time to clean up the output. Remove those redundant comments that explain what the code is obviously doing. Delete the unnecessary blank lines and the overly verbose variable names. Make it look like code you actually wrote.

Most importantly: you need to be able to explain what every part of your code does and how it works. If you can't answer questions about your own PR during code review, that's a problem.

We reserve the right to close any pull request that looks or feels like it was generated by an AI without further explanation. We're not going to debate whether something "really" was AI-generated—if the maintainers think it looks like it, that's enough.

Contributors who repeatedly submit AI-generated work will be banned from our GitHub organization.

This policy may change as the landscape evolves, but for now, this is where we stand. We appreciate everyone who takes the time to submit genuine, thoughtful contributions to our projects.