LLM Usage Policy

This is a policy for how LLMs can (and can't) be used in the development of VirtualBuddy. It’s based on the policy adopted by the Rust project.

Overview

Using LLMs while contributing to VirtualBuddy is conditionally allowed, when done with care. LLMs are not a substitute for thought, and I do not allow them to be used in ways that risk losing our shared social and technical understanding of the project.

The policy's guidelines are roughly as follows:

1 - It's fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create. 2 - LLMs work best when used as a tool to write better, not faster.

Rules

Legend

• ✅ Allowed.
• ❌ Banned.
• ⚠️ Allowed with caveats. Must disclose that an LLM was used.
• ℹ️ Adds additional detail to the policy. These bullets are normative.

Summary

• ✅ Allowed: Private use.
• ❌ Banned: LLM-created comments, docs, or diagnostics. Replacing human judgement with LLM judgement. Requiring people to use an LLM to contribute.
• ⚠️ Conditionally allowed: Trivial changes, machine translation.

Non-exhaustive policy

This policy does not aim to be exhaustive.

If you have a use of LLMs in mind that isn't on this list, talk about it in the discussions, and judge it in the spirit of this overview:

• Using an LLM for your own personal use is likely allowed ✅
• Showing LLM output to another human without solicitation is likely banned ❌
• Making a decision that affects others based on LLM output requires disclosure ⚠️

✅ Allowed

The following are allowed:

• ✅ Any use of an LLM where you are the only one who sees the output. For example:
  • Asking an LLM questions about the existing codebase.
  • Asking an LLM to summarize comments on a discussion or pull request.
    • ℹ️ This does not allow reposting the summary publicly. This only includes your own personal use.
  • Asking an LLM to privately review your code or prose.
  • Writing tools for your own personal use using an LLM.
  • Using an LLM to generate possible solutions to an issue, learning from them, and then writing something from scratch in your own style.

❌ Banned

The following are banned:

• ❌ Comments from a personal user account that are originally created by an LLM.
  • ℹ️ This also applies to pull request descriptions and posts/comments in discussions.
  • ℹ️ This does not apply if the LLM content is clearly quoted and marked; you can post that. However, the content of the comment must stand on its own even without the LLM content; it's not a substitute for your own words.
  • ℹ️ See also "machine-translation" in ⚠️ below.
• ❌ Documentation that is originally created by an LLM.
  • ℹ️ This includes non-trivial source comments, such as doc-comments, safety comments, or multiple paragraphs of non-doc-comments.
  • ℹ️ This does not include "trivial" changes (see ⚠️ below).
• ❌ Treating an LLM review as a sufficient condition to merge a change. LLM reviews must be advisory-only.
  • ℹ️ An LLM review does not substitute for self-review. Authors are expected to review their own code before posting and after each change.

⚠️ Allowed with caveats

These uses are allowed on a case-by-case basis, under the rules below. If you are a new contributor, you should expect to be scrutinized more heavily than existing contributors, since you haven't yet established trust with your reviewers.

All uses under "⚠️ Allowed with caveats" must disclose that an LLM was used.

• ⚠️ Using machine-translation (e.g. Google Translate) from your native language without posting your original message is allowed but discouraged. Doing so can introduce new miscommunications that weren't there originally, and prevents someone who speaks the language from providing a better translation.
  • ℹ️ Posting both your original message and the translated version is always ok, but you must still disclose that machine-translation was used.
• ⚠️ "Trivial" code or prose changes.
  • ℹ️ Changes are trivial if there is no other way to write them, or the other ways to write them are nearly identical. For example, the following are all trivial:
    • Typo fixes
    • Markdown links
    • Changing a word to a synonym
    • Type signatures for a trait implementation
  • ℹ️ Be cautious about PRs that consist solely of trivial changes.
• ⚠️ Using an LLM to discover bugs, as long as you personally verify the bug.
  • ℹ️ This also includes reviewers who use LLMs to discover flaws in unmerged code.
  • ℹ️ See also "Comments from a personal user account" under ❌ above.

Appendix

Responsibility

Your contributions are your responsibility; you cannot place any blame on an LLM.

The meaning of "originally created by an LLM"

This document uses the phrase "originally created by an LLM" to mean "text that was generated by an LLM (and then possibly edited by a human)". No amount of editing can change how it was originally created; the origin sets the initial style, and that style is very hard to change once it's set.

This policy makes no distinction between LLM output that comes from a chat interface and output that comes from editor auto-completion. In most cases the output is "trivial" (see above under ⚠️), but regardless, it is not treated specially by this policy.