Add guidelines for using AI tools

Author: chriscool

Diff for: General-Application-Information.md

@@ -130,6 +130,78 @@ are interested in, it is a good idea to:
 used for searching the mailing list and linking to previous
 discussions.)
 
+## AI guidelines
+
+The use of Artificial Intelligence related tools ("AI" or "AIs" for
+short), like Large Language Models ("LLMs"), by developers is becoming
+more and more popular, but that's not a reason to blindly use them,
+especially when working on the Git project.
+
+### Legal issues
+
+In general, it's not clear if AI generated code or documentation are
+acceptable in the Git project. Authors contributing to Git are
+required to "sign off" the patches they contribute, and to agree with
+the Developer’s Certificate of Origin, also called DCO, (see
+https://git-scm.com/docs/SubmittingPatches#sign-off), while the DCO
+says basically that authors of a patch should be sure about the origin
+of its content.
+
+As we cannot usually be sure how AIs have been trained and that they
+are not just repeating proprietary existing code or docuementation
+they saw during their training, we cannot accept much AI generated
+code or documentation in general. Now, if it's only a few lines to fix
+a bug or to implement a common pattern or summarize something, and if
+that looks specific enough to a current concrete problem a developer
+is working on that might be OK.
+
+Anyway as the situation is not clear for the Git project and probably
+many other open source projects, you should be very prudent regarding
+this.
+
+### Be very careful with AI output
+
+For a number of reasons, not just legal ones, developers should really
+make sure that they treat what AIs produce very carefully. They
+should:
+
+  - triple check everything, especially regarding our guidelines
+(indent, style, commit message guidelines, etc, see especially the
+SubmittingPatches and CodingGuidelines docs as well as the other pages
+on this website) and the feedback reviewers already gave them or
+others,
+
+  - doubt anything they don't fully understand, or anything that might
+not match our guidelines or feedback, and
+
+  - fix, simplify, adapt or change anything that is suspicious,
+bloated, too formal, or that they don't understand, or that doesn't
+match our guidelines or our feedback.
+
+Yeah, AIs still often hallucinate or just produce bad outputs, even
+when you point out their mistakes.
+
+It's unacceptable to send us something that is obvious AI slop, or
+that sounds overly formal or bloated, or that looks good on the
+surface but makes no sense, or that senders don’t understand or cannot
+explain. It just wastes our time and we cannot accept it.
+
+For example, it's unacceptable to have an AI generate a commit message
+where it just describes what the code in the commit does, instead of
+the purpose of the change, and then send that to us.
+
+### Better ways to use AIs
+
+Developers would often likely get better results, learn more and have
+a better overall experience by asking AIs to only explain things, and
+guide them step by step towards producing a solution by themselves,
+rather than by asking for a full solution that they would then mostly
+copy-paste.
+
+They can also use AIs to help with debugging, or with checking for
+obvious mistakes, things that can be improved, things that don't match
+our style, guidelines or our feedback, before sending it to us.
+
 ## Note about the number of slots
 
 The Git organization usually has very limited mentoring capacity.

Diff for: General-Microproject-Information.md

@@ -211,6 +211,15 @@ questions on the mailing list or in IRC, or writing new tests, etc.,
 etc. In short, start doing things that other Git developers do!
 Alternatively you can of course focus on your project proposal.
 
+## Be very careful when using AI tools
+
+There is an "AI guidelines" section on our
+General-Application-Information page:
+
+https://git.github.io/General-Application-Information/
+
+Please read it and make sure you use AI very carefully.
+
 ## How to find ideas for microprojects
 
 First check the specific page(s) or information about Git