If you maintain Open Source software, you will likely have encountered AI slop PRs.
Not all AI authored code can be considered slop, which is why a blanket ban on AI would be counterproductive. My definition of “slop” is work that is AI generated, with very little involvement by the human operator. It may seem like a good deal if somebody is spending their tokens to help your project, but without a passing understanding of the project or issue in question, the author can’t always prompt their way to a good solution.
As far as I can tell, most AI slop PRs are generated by a relatively small number of individuals. They tend to arrive in batches, and I can see the author has submitted dozens or even 100s of PRs to other projects. The work is typically a poor solution, not required, or simply broken. And the author will never follow up on comments.
It is in effect a DDOS for FOSS maintainers; it takes much longer to review the PR than it did to create it.
Nonetheless, I still feel bad about closing a PR without comment. But at the same time resentful at having to spend time formulating a response, that will likely be ignored.
So I plan to include a text file in my project, to clarify my stance on AI PRs.
I’m calling this AI_POLICY.md.
I did consider adding an AI policy to CONTRIBUTING.md, but that file tends to be used to inform how to contribute, which seems a different purpose entirely.
I’m hoping this could become a standard file, and AI agents would refer to this when generating a PR. Until then, I can link to it when I close slop PRs.
If something like this exists already, or there is a more agent-friendly way of doing this, then let me know.
Here’s the text I’m going with. I don’t think this is particularly challenging to meet, and only a slightly higher bar than what I’d expect from a mammalian brain.
AI_POLICY.md
This project accepts AI generated Pull Requests, as long as the following guidelines are met.
- The Pull Request must fill in the repository’s pull request template.
- The Pull Request must identify itself as AI generated, including the name of the agent used.
- The Pull Request must link to a issue or discussion where a solution has been approved by a maintainer (@willmcgugan).
The maintainer reserves the right to close PRs without comment if the above are not met.
Update
Turns out AI_POLICY.md is being used in a bunch of projects, for this purpose.
Oddly, Claude told me there was no standard for this. I suspect this is an organically emerging “standard”, and I hope it is adopted by more projects!