I think we have to operate with an understanding that there will ultimately be no way to distinguish between an LLM-assisted patch and one that isn’t, provided sufficient human polishing. We also have no way to trust the discipline of contributors in tagging patches as such. Any policies we put in place that ignores these two things is simply going to be abused.
The collaboration that takes place during review is still perhaps the only way we have to vet both contributors and their contributions, at least when it comes to codebase interaction. I’m only human, and when I review something, it’s usually because, at least indirectly, it benefits me (or someone who’s paying me) in some way. Especially for a larger change, I’m willing to invest time as long as the author is willing to openly collaborate and bring it to the bar (yeah, I know, definition of “done”), regardless of what tools they used to get there. I’ll support almost any set of guidelines on how to use the tools reasonably to produce better patches and do better reviews, as long as they stop short of creating a new contributor hierarchy we have to maintain. (I’m going to read the Rust guidelines again…) I’d even support mandating then use of available AGENTS/CLAUDE/GEMINI.mds if we can agree on them, although simply providing them as we do with IDE configurations is a good start. > On Sep 28, 2026, at 7:50 AM, Shailaja Koppu via dev > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Stefan, > > From personal side, I completely agree with you. I am giving potential > options only to address concerns like - new contributors overwhelming the > community with AI generated PRs just to show as add-on in their profile and > vanish after that, or purely AI opened PRs without developer review or > understanding. But the later can happen with anyone including committers due > to workload/deadlines or misled by AI etc. Also, someone can copy a AI > generated patch line by line skipping comments, which looks like a > handwritten code. > > > Thanks, > Shailaja > > > >>> On Sep 28, 2026, at 12:23 PM, Štefan Miklošovič <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> >>> - Only Cassandra committers may submit AI-assisted PRs. This would mean new >>> contributors first write and understand code without AI before becoming >>> committers; or >>> - Contributors may submit AI-assisted changes in a component/subcomponent >>> only after they have submitted at least one non-AI PR in that >>> component/subcomponent. >> >> I am not sure if I am missing something but can you all explain in >> simple terms how is this actually enforceable in practice? >> >> "Only Cassandra committers may submit AI-assisted PRs" - there is no >> restriction who can create a PR and how. It is not like we see that a >> PR is created with heavy AI usage, then we check if a contributor is a >> committer and when they are not we comment on that PR saying - "hold >> your horses mate, we checked the list and you are not a committer, >> sorry, we have to close this". >> >> If a PR is crafted "carefuly" then it might look like a completely >> legitimate piece of work while it is still 100% prompted and the >> author does not have a clue what they did. I mean ... how do you make >> the difference between what is "real" and what is AI-driven 100%? I >> think that even if we "guessed" which one is which, the possibility to >> see this is being progressively erased as this tech is evolving and we >> will eventually not have a clue. >
