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AI contribution policy
Pablo Brubeck edited this page Aug 26, 2026
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Firedrake will accept AI contributions subject to the following conditions:
- Contributions assisted by AI must state which tool was used and apply the
LLM usedpull request label. - The contributor must be in a position to license the code under our licences. This means for example that 'mechanical work' (e.g. search and replace) is likely to be acceptable, but code with a substantive creative/scientific element is unlikely to be so because of the risk of code from other projects being reproduced verbatim in breach of their licences.
- The PR must be led by an informed human. We will not accept having reviewer questions answered by the AI tool. The contributor must fully understand the changes that they are proposing and be able to explain and justify them.
- We will not accept AI-written PRs that fix issues labelled 'good first issue'. These issues are good entry points for newcomers to Firedrake and open source software so having them be closed by an AI tool is not beneficial.
The repository root has an AGENTS.md file describing Firedrake's architecture, coding conventions, and testing/PR expectations for AI coding agents. Before using an AI tool to contribute, make sure it has read and is actually following it.
It is also worth stating some critical requirements for all PRs that would be easy to miss if using an AI tool:
- The code must have first been run locally to verify that it works.
- Submissions should be targeted and well designed with good abstractions. We will not accept PRs with diffs that are far larger than necessary for the contribution they provide.