Re: An AI Usage Policy for IPFire

[Adolf Belka <adolf.belka@ipfire.org>]

Hi Michael,

On 23/01/2026 15:48, Michael Tremer wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> While eating my lunch today I stumbled over the AI Usage Policy that the Ghostty project has come up with. I quite liked it and I think that IPFire should also have a policy for AI usage in place. We have not received such an overwhelming amount of AI-generated patches unlike Ghostty and cURL, but we have received some that have been very low quality and when asked questions, the person who submitted this patch raised his hands and dropped out. This is just a waste of time for everyone involved.
> 
> This policy that I have slightly adapted for IPFire demands that any kind of AI usage is allowed, but has to be disclosed. The point is to avoid any kind of low-quality, time-wasting submissions. I too believe that we should make this known upfront so that we can all be on the same page and make the job easy for us in case we need to reject any kind of patch submission.
> 
> On the other hand, the policy is encouraging AI usage as there are indeed tasks where AI can help. But just because it is AI-generated does not mean that something is good.
> 
> I would like you all to have a look at this and see if this is working for you as well or if you would like to have any changes made to it:

Most of it seems fine to me and I agree with it.

The only concerns are that it refers to pull requests from external users but as far as I am aware we generally don't accept pull requests, certainly not in the GitHub repo. If any IPFire GitHub pull request has any merits then an IPFire developer has to take the pull request and convert it into an IPFire patch submission supplied to the IPFire Development mailing list.

If the intent of pull request as mentioned in the AI Policy is different than what I have described above then it is not clear to me from the policy wording.

Regards,

Adolf.


> 
>    https://www.ipfire.org/docs/devel/ai-policy
> 
> All the best,
> -Michael