AI Usage Policy

The Polars project has strict rules for AI usage:

• All AI usage in any form must be disclosed. You must state the tool(s) you used (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Amp) along with the extent that the work was AI-assisted.

• Pull requests created in any way by AI can only be for accepted issues. Drive-by pull requests that do not reference an accepted issue will be closed. If AI isn't disclosed but a maintainer suspects its use, the PR will be closed. If you want to share code for a non-accepted issue, open a discussion or attach it to an existing discussion.

• Pull requests created by AI must have been fully verified with human use. AI must not create hypothetically correct code that hasn't been tested. Importantly, you must not allow AI to write code for platforms or environments you don't have access to manually test on.

• Issues and discussions can use AI assistance but must have a full human-in-the-loop. This means that any content generated with AI must have been reviewed and edited by a human before submission. AI is very good at being overly verbose and including noise that distracts from the main point. Humans must do their research and trim this down.

• No AI-generated media or text (other than code) is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.). Code (docstrings included) is the only acceptable AI-generated content, per the other rules in this policy.

Rationale

We have established these rules not because we are against AI usage, but because we have experienced an increasing number of low-quality pull requests that consume significant amounts of human reviewers' time. Poor usage of AI can generate tremendous amounts of low-quality code and "slop" PRs, which can have a net-negative effect on the maintenance of Polars. We hope to bring this under control by applying stricter AI rules, where AI can be used as a tool without overwhelming the project maintainers.