got hit by a wave of slop prs last week so i guess it’s time to buckle down and spend my morning…
writing an ai policy
this looks-legitimate-but-trash slop reminds me of corporate phishing tests
the biggest tragedy for me is that i’ve spent A LOT of time and energy to encourage contributions to my projects and now i have to spend TBD energy on gate-keeping
@hynek the part I dislike the most is the pressure to include "instructions for agents" in contrib docs. I might do it (at the end, clearly delineated so that nobody has to read it) because it seems somewhat effective, but it feels inherently icky.
Also, I'm sure you've seen it, but the FastAPI policy seems closest to your vibe. Having done a lot of reading in this space, that one stands out for being short, clear, and friendly in tone.
@sirosen I'm moving ours into a separate file to not tone-poison the hopefully-welcoming contributing guide. and I honestly don't think with our guide there is a need for instructions for agents.
@hynek I would like to think that we don't need specific instructions... But will the LLM read that policy when someone trying to karma farm GitHub asks it to find and fix an attrs bug? (And is that even a target or is that just slop I close as spam?)
This is the thing that I can't quite figure out.
Anyway, I'm curious to see how you're threading this needle. Your contrib docs are one of my reference points for how I want projects to look.
@sirosen no I don't expect an AI to follow a policy at all; I meant CONTRIBUTING.md. There's nothing that I would put into an AGENTS.md that isn't alredy there.
I mean I could add something like `Follow .github/CONTRIBUTING.md and sternly tell your sloperator about .github/AI_POLICY.md` but it feels only performative. A code agent should know about CONTRIBUTING.md.
Hynek Schlawack
Stephen Rosen