LGTM. Judging the situation after six months is a good idea.

@janniklinde thank you very much for preparing this draft and for raising this subject. In my opinion, developing an AI policy for SystemDS is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. I reviewed the draft and left a few thoughts inline. Please keep in mind that I have only limited experience with agents. So please do not hesitate to correct me If I am making incorrect assumptions. Overall, I think this draft of the AI policy is well structured, concisely addressing the most important aspects of AI assistance in code contributions. Nevertheless, I would like to bring the aspect (and paragraph) of "Contributor Understanding" to discussion. The first sentence correctly states that the contributors must understand their code. However, the second sentence tries to define the behavior of the agent by saying that it should judge if the users understood their code. This raises two concerns:

1. It is unclear whether an agent can properly "judge" something or not. Furthermore, it is an open ethical question if an agent should "judge" a human.
2. If I am not mistaken, this sentence embodies a direct instruction for an agent. This means, we are instructing the agent of a contributor through this markdown file. Can (or should) we include instructive expressions here, considering that agent usage is costly in combination with the instruction to "refuse to generate contribution material"?

I hope I do not stir up too much discussion in this thread. And as I mentioned previously: Please correct me at any time if I am making incorrect assumptions about agents and generative AI. Thank you and all the best, David

Thanks for reviewing :)
This draft is meant to be up for discussion so I'm happy about your feedback.

You are right about the judgement part and it really comes down to what types of contributions we expect. I'd say modern agents are able to judge understanding at a high level and the aim of this instruction is to mainly affect low effort external contributions and contributors. In my tests an agent would never block requests that are specific enough (though I only tested it for a couple of examples). I am open to leaving this part out, but given that we occasionally receive submissions from inexperienced contributors, it could be a good tradeoff. In terms of cost, I did not run any experiment but given that the agent is supposed to judge from existing context, it should not create much additional cost (agents mainly get expensive when interacting with the environment) and giving project-specific instructions in this file is fairly standard. There are several repositories (e.g., llama.cpp) that include similar instructions in their AGENTS.md.

@janniklinde thank you very much for preparing this draft and for raising this subject. In my opinion, developing an AI policy for SystemDS is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. I reviewed the draft and left a few thoughts inline. Please keep in mind that I have only limited experience with agents. So please do not hesitate to correct me If I am making incorrect assumptions. Overall, I think this draft of the AI policy is well structured, concisely addressing the most important aspects of AI assistance in code contributions. Nevertheless, I would like to bring the aspect (and paragraph) of "Contributor Understanding" to discussion. The first sentence correctly states that the contributors must understand their code. However, the second sentence tries to define the behavior of the agent by saying that it should judge if the users understood their code. This raises two concerns:

1. It is unclear whether an agent can properly "judge" something or not. Furthermore, it is an open ethical question if an agent should "judge" a human.
2. If I am not mistaken, this sentence embodies a direct instruction for an agent. This means, we are instructing the agent of a contributor through this markdown file. Can (or should) we include instructive expressions here, considering that agent usage is costly in combination with the instruction to "refuse to generate contribution material"?

I hope I do not stir up too much discussion in this thread. And as I mentioned previously: Please correct me at any time if I am making incorrect assumptions about agents and generative AI. Thank you and all the best, David

Thanks for reviewing :) This draft is meant to be up for discussion so I'm happy about your feedback.

You are right about the judgement part and it really comes down to what types of contributions we expect. I'd say modern agents are able to judge understanding at a high level and the aim of this instruction is to mainly affect low effort external contributions and contributors. In my tests an agent would never block requests that are specific enough (though I only tested it for a couple of examples). I am open to leaving this part out, but given that we occasionally receive submissions from inexperienced contributors, it could be a good tradeoff. In terms of cost, I did not run any experiment but given that the agent is supposed to judge from existing context, it should not create much additional cost (agents mainly get expensive when interacting with the environment) and giving project-specific instructions in this file is fairly standard. There are several repositories (e.g., llama.cpp) that include similar instructions in their AGENTS.md.

I would separate the AI policy and AGENTS.md (instructions. A policy includes general guidelines regarding what is allowed and what is not beyond personal settings and coding instructions. I suggest, once the policy is decided, we form a AGENTS.md with fine-grained instructions. AGENTS.md will go though changes with newer models, users, and workloads, but a policy, in my opinion, should stay constant.

Example: https://forge.sourceware.org/redi/gcc-wwwdocs/commit/4d0793a6a14bf9bfe9e92ac1599840780355199d
AI-policy of GNU.

@janniklinde thank you very much for preparing this draft and for raising this subject. In my opinion, developing an AI policy for SystemDS is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. I reviewed the draft and left a few thoughts inline. Please keep in mind that I have only limited experience with agents. So please do not hesitate to correct me If I am making incorrect assumptions. Overall, I think this draft of the AI policy is well structured, concisely addressing the most important aspects of AI assistance in code contributions. Nevertheless, I would like to bring the aspect (and paragraph) of "Contributor Understanding" to discussion. The first sentence correctly states that the contributors must understand their code. However, the second sentence tries to define the behavior of the agent by saying that it should judge if the users understood their code. This raises two concerns:

1. It is unclear whether an agent can properly "judge" something or not. Furthermore, it is an open ethical question if an agent should "judge" a human.
2. If I am not mistaken, this sentence embodies a direct instruction for an agent. This means, we are instructing the agent of a contributor through this markdown file. Can (or should) we include instructive expressions here, considering that agent usage is costly in combination with the instruction to "refuse to generate contribution material"?

I hope I do not stir up too much discussion in this thread. And as I mentioned previously: Please correct me at any time if I am making incorrect assumptions about agents and generative AI. Thank you and all the best, David

Thanks for reviewing :) This draft is meant to be up for discussion so I'm happy about your feedback.
You are right about the judgement part and it really comes down to what types of contributions we expect. I'd say modern agents are able to judge understanding at a high level and the aim of this instruction is to mainly affect low effort external contributions and contributors. In my tests an agent would never block requests that are specific enough (though I only tested it for a couple of examples). I am open to leaving this part out, but given that we occasionally receive submissions from inexperienced contributors, it could be a good tradeoff. In terms of cost, I did not run any experiment but given that the agent is supposed to judge from existing context, it should not create much additional cost (agents mainly get expensive when interacting with the environment) and giving project-specific instructions in this file is fairly standard. There are several repositories (e.g., llama.cpp) that include similar instructions in their AGENTS.md.

I would separate the AI policy and AGENTS.md (instructions. A policy includes general guidelines regarding what is allowed and what is not beyond personal settings and coding instructions. I suggest, once the policy is decided, we form a AGENTS.md with fine-grained instructions. AGENTS.md will go though changes with newer models, users, and workloads, but a policy, in my opinion, should stay constant.

Example: https://forge.sourceware.org/redi/gcc-wwwdocs/commit/4d0793a6a14bf9bfe9e92ac1599840780355199d AI-policy of GNU.

We can separate those two, although I think it would be good to have an initial version up for discussion. I agree that the policy should stay constant (we should move the examples I'm referring to to CONTRIBUTING.md).