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docs: track the contributing guide and AI policy - #238

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@BenWestgate BenWestgate commented Sep 23, 2026 •

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CONTRIBUTING.md is an empty placeholder on master, so the repository does not currently ship usable contribution guidance. This PR makes the project’s contributor expectations explicit and tracked.

  • CONTRIBUTING.md: contributor workflow, focused/atomic changes, commit-message guidance, rebasing, ACK/NACK review vocabulary, and review expectations.
  • docs/developer-notes.md: concise Bails-specific notes on scope, shell conventions, persistence, repository layout, testing, and reviewability.
  • docs/AI_POLICY.md: contributors must understand and take responsibility for work produced with AI assistance; agents are not authors or co-authors.

The guide has been pruned to Bails rather than copying Bitcoin Core-only processes. Its upstream Bitcoin Core attribution is preserved, the AI-policy and developer-notes links resolve inside this repository, the rebase/force-push examples avoid clobbering remote work, and policy feedback points to the Bails tracker.

Testing: git diff --check; documentation links and repository paths reviewed against the branch.

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Comment thread CONTRIBUTING.md Outdated
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Comment thread docs/AI_POLICY.md
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BenWestgate force-pushed the docs-contributing-ai-policy branch from bc3c4cb to 9af48b7 Compare September 23, 2026 22:29
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@codex review

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💡 Codex Review

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Reviewed commit: 9af48b7c7b

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@claude fix this PR

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BenWestgate force-pushed the docs-contributing-ai-policy branch from 9af48b7 to fbfc4c0 Compare September 24, 2026 01:28
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Pushed fbfc4c0, which addresses six of the seven review threads. Responses to each, including one I disagree with.

P1, retain Bitcoin Core's copyright notice. Agreed and fixed. An Attribution section now names the source file,
the copyright holder and the MIT license. This was the one finding that had to be fixed rather than argued.

Link to the tracked AI policy. Agreed. The link now points at docs/AI_POLICY.md, the path the policy is
actually added at. Renaming the directory to doc/ instead would collide with four open pull requests that touch
docs/ (#202, #226, #230, #237), so that is better done on its own once this stack has landed.

Replace Bitcoin Core-only contributor references. Agreed, and pruned more widely than the thread asks. Gone:
doc/developer-notes.md in all four places, test/functional/README.md, /contrib/verify-commits,
/doc/productivity.md, the monotree sentence, the unit/functional/fuzz test vocabulary, and the entire Backporting
section, which describes release branches and label conventions this repository does not have. Where a rule was worth
keeping, it is restated in terms that apply: coding conventions become "match the style of the surrounding shell
scripts", and the testing requirement becomes the shell linting workflow.

Send policy feedback to this project's tracker. Agreed. It now says this repository's issue tracker, and the
bitcoin-core/meta link definition is removed.

Protect remote updates during force-push. Agreed. The squash workflow now uses --force-with-lease, with a note
that it refuses to clobber commits you have not fetched.

Fetch and rebase the project target branch. Agreed. git fetch is now git fetch upstream master, so
FETCH_HEAD names the target branch rather than whatever the topic branch happens to track on the contributor's own
fork.

Attribute this commit to its human contributor — disagree, this does not apply. The claim is that the commit
records Codex <codex@openai.com> as author and committer. It does not:

$ git log -1 --format='%an <%ae> / %cn <%ce>' origin/docs-contributing-ai-policy
Ben Westgate <BenWestgate@protonmail.com> / Ben Westgate <BenWestgate@protonmail.com>

Both author and committer are the human contributor, and there is no agent trailer in the message. The policy this
commit adds is therefore not violated by the commit adding it. If the finding was raised against some other commit,
it is not one on this branch.

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Triage: most prior review feedback is fixed, including the AI-policy link, upstream attribution, safer force-push/rebase guidance, and human commit authorship. Two small cleanup items remain before human review: add the concise developer-notes file explicitly requested in review, and remove/replace the stale contrib/debian/copyright reference. After that, this should be ready for human review; the PR body should also be refreshed because its listed blockers are now stale.

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BenWestgate force-pushed the docs-contributing-ai-policy branch 2 times, most recently from 676b3ed to 9d5066b Compare September 24, 2026 10:45

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Comment thread CONTRIBUTING.md
@BenWestgate BenWestgate self-assigned this Sep 24, 2026

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AI-generated review (Claude), posted at the maintainer's request.

Concept ACK 9d5066b. Two open items:

  • upstream is never defined (Codex P2 on L152; the @claude request didn't trigger anything). Add git remote add upstream https://github.com/BenWestgate/Bails.git to the fork setup, or fetch that URL directly.
  • AI policy: the maintainer comment on L26 asked that agents confirm a human chose the work, understands it and is responsible before opening a PR. The text states the human requirement, but not that agent-side check. One line would cover it.
  • The policy bars AI-generated comments, yet the repo gets disclosed, maintainer-requested AI reviews (Codex, this one). Consider an explicit exception for those.

Authorship on both commits is now human, the Bitcoin Core notice is kept, and --force-with-lease is used. Good.

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AI-generated review, posted at the maintainer's request.

ACK 3ed6dcb. The last open contributor-workflow issue is fixed: upstream is now defined before use. Lint CI and dependency review are green. Ready for human review.

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AI-generated review, posted at the maintainer's request.

ACK 652721e. The final delta explicitly requires human sponsorship before an agent opens a PR. Lint CI and dependency review are green. Ready for human review.

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BenWestgate force-pushed the docs-contributing-ai-policy branch from 652721e to 8ebb5e4 Compare October 1, 2026 05:04
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BenWestgate force-pushed the docs-contributing-ai-policy branch 2 times, most recently from 31bfa4d to 4e602bb Compare October 1, 2026 08:50
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Codex current-head review at 4e602bb: no findings. The remaining cleanup feedback is addressed: docs/developer-notes.md now exists with Bails-specific shell/testing guidance, and the contributor attribution/license text no longer references stale Debian packaging material.

CONTRIBUTING.md has been an empty placeholder, and the AI policy existed
only as an untracked file in a working tree, so neither was visible to
anyone cloning the repository. Both describe how contributions are
expected to arrive, which is of no use while they are unreadable.

The contributing guide covers the fork-and-pull-request workflow, atomic
commits, commit message form, and the ACK/NACK review vocabulary. The AI
policy states that contributors must understand what they submit, that
pull requests should not be opened or driven by autonomous agents, and
that agents are not to be listed as commit authors or co-authors.
Two coding-convention references were rewritten to "match the style of
the surrounding shell scripts" because docs/developer-notes.md did not
exist when the guide was pruned. It does now, with a Shell code section
covering exactly this, so both point at it instead.
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BenWestgate force-pushed the docs-contributing-ai-policy branch from 4e602bb to 0f27e23 Compare October 4, 2026 18:54
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Codex current-head review at 0f27e23: no findings. The only delta since the prior clean review adds the requested explicit agent-side human-sponsorship check before opening a PR; it is consistent with the surrounding AI policy.

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Wonderful documents, thanks for your contribution.

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BenWestgate enabled auto-merge (squash) October 5, 2026 03:59
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BenWestgate disabled auto-merge October 5, 2026 03:59
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BenWestgate merged commit 9b1b418 into master Oct 5, 2026
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BenWestgate deleted the docs-contributing-ai-policy branch October 5, 2026 03:59
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