Make AI use required in templates & update automated PR reply

[MisRob]

Summary

• Makes AI use required in templates
• Updates automated PR reply:
  • New guidance
  • Adds direct mention to increase changes folks get notified

Toggle closed	Toggle open

[MisRob]

Alongside making the AI Usage section required I considered AI Usage as a very first section to fill.

Reasoning is that majority of issues and PRs will state that they use AI, whether from the community or internal team. And so I'd say it makes sense for both writer & reader to have this info as a first thing to encounter.

Of course internally we can agree that whenever relevant, we can be more benevolent with the core team or even skip (e.g. QA team).

[MisRob]

In this section should we also ask folks to confirm that it follows https://learningequality.org/contributing-to-our-open-code-base/#using-generative-ai? Since in some areas it has a bit more guidance. Or would it be too much and we want to focus on DEEP here?

[MisRob]

@rtibbles not sure what were your thoughts ~ in the latest version I tried to add a link in comment sections too.

[MisRob]

I'd prefer to reference them for now since that's what we have linked everywhere.

Ideally we'd just have DEEP in the contributing guidelines & merge info from both sources into a coherent thing. Likely some time after we feel that's what we'll be using in long-term (updating the website is a bit longer process and it's easier to not have to iterate frequently).

[rtibbles]

Looks like the AI usage section has been promoted over all the others - I agree that making it mandatory is good, but we should still have it last so as not to obscure the important part of the issue/PR

[MisRob]

@rtibbles I updated according to what we discussed on Slack + few minor language tweaks.

Also I recalled I wanted to update the automated reply accordingly. Please see the screenshot I added to the PR summary ~ this was the best version I've arrived at so far.

[MisRob]

update the automated reply accordingly

Oh now I noticed that for disclosure examples I copied those that are relevant to issues. I will update to those we use for PRs.

Let's hear if you have additional thoughts first though, I will then update at once.

[rtibbles]

Yes, I had deliberately made a different example in the comment for the pull request, so should be able to copy that in directly into the bot message!

[akolson]

@MisRob This looks fine to me! Could we have a simple example of we are looking out for, so we can avoid yet another barrage of AI generated responses for that section?

[MisRob]

@rtibbles

Yes, I had deliberately made a different example in the comment for the pull request, so should be able to copy that in directly into the bot message!

Done, new screenshot when toggle open:

@akolson

Could we have a simple example of we are looking out for, so we can avoid yet another barrage of AI generated responses for that section?

This is not apparent in the diff, because I didn't modify that part. We already had such examples prepared by Richard some time ago :) On few PRs I already saw contributors to use them nicely. Or did you have something else in mind?

One example from PR template, but you will also find another examples in each issue template.

Examples of good disclosures:
"I used Claude Code to implement the component, prompting it to follow
the pattern in ComponentX. I reviewed the generated code, removed
unnecessary error handling, and verified the tests pass."

"I brainstormed the approach with Gemini, then had it write failing
tests for the feature. After reviewing the tests, I used Claude Code
to generate the implementation. I refactored the output to reduce
verbosity and ran the full test suite."