At the time of writing this, Flare has received and merged a handful of AI-assisted contributions. These have been minor corrections to build scripts and documentation. One might argue that this means the flood gates have already opened. So as the project's lead (and currently sole) maintainer, I (@dorkster) feel now is the best time lay out our rules with regards to AI usage. Keep in mind that this document is subject to change as the culture around AI evolves.
Before continuing, I would however like to express my personal thoughts on AI usage. The extent of my AI usage is as a glorified search engine, and I have never used it to assist with programming, art, or game design. I believe that all three of these creative endeavors (yes, I'm counting programming as a creative endeavor) deserve to be experienced as the technical, skilled processes that they are. I would urge anyone that has not earnestly attempted these the traditional way to avoid reaching for AI in the first place. The satisfaction is usually worth more than the end result.
Much of the following has been lifted verbatim from Ghostty's AI policy, which I've found to be pragmatic with its focus on maintaining the human element.
The Flare project has strict rules for AI usage:
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All AI usage in any form must be disclosed. You must state the tool you used (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Amp) along with the extent that the work was AI-assisted.
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The human-in-the-loop must fully understand all code. If you can't explain what your changes do and how they interact with the greater system without the aid of AI tools, do not contribute to this project.
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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.
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No AI-generated media is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.). Text and code that are not part of the game data (i.e. inside the
modsfolder) are the only acceptable AI-generated content, per the other rules in this policy. -
Your contributions represent you. Contributors are assumed to be working in good faith. But submitting a flood of low-quality, "slop" contributions will result in single warning, followed by a ban if the behavior is not addressed reasonably. "Slop" may have different meanings to different people, but I would define it as code that has no respect for the existing program's code structure and runtime behavior. For example, code that fails to utilize existing functionality and instead opts to plop down its own implementation of a function where it pleases. Or, it could be code that haphazardly introduces obvious runtime bugs that show that the contributor did not test even once.
Please remember that Flare is maintained by humans.
Every discussion, issue, and pull request is read and reviewed by humans (and sometimes machines, too). It is a boundary point at which people interact with each other and the work done. It is rude and disrespectful to approach this boundary with low-effort, unqualified work, since it puts the burden of validation on the maintainer.
In a perfect world, AI would produce high-quality, accurate work every time. But today, that reality depends on the driver of the AI. And today, most drivers of AI are just not good enough. So, until either the people get better, the AI gets better, or both, we have to have strict rules to protect maintainers.