Re: [PATCH v2] docs/devel: relax policy on AI-generated contributions

Daniel P. Berrangé <[email protected]> writes:

> On Fri, Aug 07, 2026 at 01:39:32PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:

[...]

>> I don't think we should have AI generated docs, including
>> developer docs, as I noted somewhere up thread. That's not for
>> any particular copyright reasons, it's because we need actual
>> humans to be understanding and writing the documentation,
>> because it can't be easily cross-checked by tests.
>
> IME, it is by writing docs for a feature, that you come to learn about
> the flaws / gaps in the thing that is implemented, which feeds back to
> improve the code.  Generating docs you're just going get text that
> reflects the state of the code without the learning & improvement
> experiance.

100%.  Attempting to write contracts for crap I wrote has made me
recognize it as crap so many times.

> I don't think we should have an exception for tests either. If we
> have code in the tests directory that is generalized to become
> part of the broader codebase, we shouldn't have to think about the
> history of whether the tests code was AI generated.
>
> The boundary between docs and code is also not entirely clear cut
> and intermingled in areas like command line help, QAPI inline
> docs, API doc comments,and so on.
>
> IMHO all content in the repository should be treated the equivalently
> and held to a common standard. IOW, *if* we decide it is reasonable to
> allow limited AI/LLM usage in some manner, prefer to do that universally
> rather than trying to be very selective across sub-directories/files.
>
> Simplicity & clarity of rules makes it more likely that people will
> actually be able to follow them.

Also reduces rules-lawyering temptation.