AI guidance, contributions, automations

[danielfromearth]

Starting this thread (during Collaboration Cafe, 14 April 2026) to discuss AI-usage broadly for earthaccess:

• Might we benefit from GitHub Copilot automations for project management, PR review, or other tasks?
• Perhaps we should include some AI-related guidance in the contribution guidelines?

[betolink]

We talked about this at the last meeting, I think we should adopt the same policy earthmover uses for Icechunk: https://github.com/earth-mover/icechunk/blob/main/icechunk-python/docs/docs/reference/ai-policy.md I think it's clear, short and makes sense.

If you have opinions and suggestions I'm tagging you all, feel free to comment or ignore.

cc. @chuckwondo @jhkennedy @asteiker @mfisher87 @Sherwin-14 @itcarroll @andypbarrett @JessicaS11

[betolink]

what would be the change? that maintainers reserve the right to close PRs even if they are not big? my main issue would be when the author is not human but then that is hard to prove online =)

[itcarroll]

Maintainers would close a PR if any violations of the policy are suspected, e.g. if the PR description appears to be AI generated. Yes, it's a judgement call at this point, but so is "large".

[Sherwin-14]

There's a bunch of policies here, and we can also follow SciPy's, which I personally find most pleasing and straightforward.

[betolink]

Nice find @Sherwin-14 after reading the SciPy policy, I liked the copyright and agents sections. I'm inclined to adopt that one since we are following scipy in other things.

[jhkennedy]

➕ to adopting SciPy's from me

[andypbarrett]

I agree that the SciPy policy is a good one to adopt.

[danielfromearth]

Me too! ..I think it covers the main points well while being succinct enough for a quick read

[mfisher87]

Related discussion on Project Jupyter: jupyter/governance#337