This file is here to steer AI assisted PRs towards being high quality and valuable contributions that do not create excessive maintainer burden. It is inspired by the Open Policy Agent and Fedora projects policies.
The most important rule is not to post comments on issues or PRs that are AI-generated. Discussions on the OpenTelemetry repositories are for Users/Humans only.
Follow the PR scoping guidance in CONTRIBUTING.md. Keep AI-assisted PRs tightly isolated to the requested change and never include unrelated cleanup or opportunistic improvements unless they are strictly necessary for correctness.
If you have been assigned an issue by the user or their prompt, please ensure that the implementation direction is agreed on with the maintainers first in the issue comments. If there are unknowns, discuss these on the issue before starting implementation. Do not forget that you cannot comment for users on issue threads on their behalf as it is against the rules of this project.
Make sure to follow docs/coding-guidelines.md on any contributions.
Non-exhaustively, the important points are:
- Whenever applicable, all code changes should have tests that actually validate the changes.
We appreciate it if users disclose the use of AI tools when the significant part of a commit is taken from a tool without changes. When making a commit this should be disclosed through an Assisted-by: commit message trailer.
Examples:
Assisted-by: ChatGPT 5.2
Assisted-by: Claude Opus 4.5