AI contribution policy

[tasiaiso]

Hi! Thanks for making borg, I've used it for a while (although not long enough for it to have a chance at saving my ass yet).

I wanted to know what's your viewpoint on using LLMs and accepting or refusing AI contributions. I'm a bit worried about what accepting (explicitly or not) AI generated code could entail, for many more reasons than just code quality. There's, as far as I'm aware, no clear guideline on this topic, so i think it could be a good thing to add this somewhere in the documentation (here?).

Thanks!

[ThomasWaldmann]

I understand (some of) your concerns. I even share some concerns about using "AI" and I hate it if it is abused (see AI slop on YouTube that wastes everybody's time and also a lot of resources), but I am not generally against it. As often, "it depends". It is a tool, one can use it for good or for bad.

In general, contributions (from any source) are reviewed for good quality: code, style, tests (correctness), documentation, ...

Sidenote for people who are not software developers: "tests" here mean automated tests that run Borg code and verify if the code behaves as expected. If it doesn't, we would immediately notice, because these tests are run even before we accept a contribution (see GitHub Actions). We have such tests for all Borg commands and also for the inner parts of the code.

"No AI policy": There would not be much point in demanding something that could not be verified by looking at the contribution. Before AI, people used search engines, Stack Overflow/Reddit, or random websites and copy-pasted code of varying quality. One generally does not see where code comes from, but one can review the code and have tests for it, ensuring it works correctly.

Thus, contributions must be reviewed and judged based on their contents. It's not just AI that can write incorrect code, humans do that since ever, too. :-)

If AI can be used so that the few Borg contributors can be more productive (while maintaining good quality of course), it should be used. It's not like we have a thousand active Borg developers here waiting for stuff to do...