Community - AI usage policy

This policy governs the use of generative AI and AI-assisted tooling (LLMs, coding agents, autocomplete assistants, and similar) when contributing to this repository.

AI tools are instruments — humans are the only authors.

You may use AI tools to help you contribute. But the moment you open a pull request or an issue, you are the author of every line in it. The tool is not a co-maintainer, it is not accountable, and it cannot be cited as an excuse. This policy exists so that AI accelerates good contributions without lowering the bar for quality, security, or trust.

This is a contributor-facing policy. It is not the same as AGENTS.md: that file instructs coding agents on how to write code that fits this repository, whereas this policy defines the rules and expectations for humans who use AI to contribute here.

When this applies

This policy applies to any contribution where a generative AI tool materially assisted in producing the content, including:

• source code, tests, and configuration,
• documentation and template content,
• issue descriptions, and
• review comments.

If you only used AI for spell-checking, search, or to understand existing code, disclosure is not required. If AI generated or substantially shaped the content you are submitting, it is.

Your responsibilities as a contributor

Before you submit AI-assisted work, you must:

1. Review it thoroughly. Read and understand every part of the contribution. If you do not understand it, do not submit it.
2. Verify quality. Ensure it meets this project's standards — it builds, tests pass, and it follows the conventions in the contributing guide and AGENTS.md.
3. Remove extraneous changes. Strip out unrelated edits, dead code, speculative abstractions, and noise the tool introduced. Keep the diff focused.
4. Be prepared to explain it. You must be able to justify any part of the contribution if a maintainer asks. "The AI wrote it" is not an answer.
5. Accept responsibility. You bear full accountability for the contribution, exactly as if you had written every line by hand.
6. Check licensing. Confirm that generated material does not reproduce code under incompatible licenses and does not violate this project's license.

Blindly copy-pasting AI output introduces security and stability risks. Maintainers may close such pull requests without review.

Required disclosure

If a contribution was materially AI-assisted, you must disclose it:

• Pull requests: include a Generated-by: line in the PR description naming the tool and its version, for example:

  1Generated-by: Claude Code 1.x
  2Generated-by: GitHub Copilot

  The pull request template carries a dedicated AI-assistance section — fill in the Generated-by: line, or check the "no AI assistance" box if it does not apply. A CI check verifies that one of the two is present. It confirms a declaration exists, but does not and cannot verify its truthfulness.

• Issues: note in the issue body that AI assisted in drafting it.

Disclosure is a sign of good faith, not an admission of wrongdoing. We welcome AI-assisted contributions that follow this policy.

Consequences

• Maintainers may close non-compliant pull requests without review, including undisclosed AI-generated PRs and PRs the contributor cannot explain.
• Repeated violations are treated as a breach of our Code of Conduct and may result in the contributor being blocked.

If you are unsure whether something falls under this policy, ask a maintainer in the #generator channel on AsyncAPI Slack before submitting.