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AI Policy

As an open source library, Blockly is supported by external contributions in the form of Pull Requests (PRs). The following document outlines our policy regarding the use of AI tools when making contributions to Blockly.

Creating guidelines on the use of AI allows us to:

  • Maintain a high-quality codebase
  • Reduce the review burden on the Blockly team
  • Provide accessible opportunities for new contributors

Human in the loop​

PR summaries and GitHub comments should be written by a human unless you need AI translation support. AI tools often produce verbose summaries even for small changes, which makes them difficult to review. Writing the PR summary yourself also ensures that you fully understand the code you’ve submitted.

Humans are reading and reviewing all of the PRs that you submit, so we ask that you make it easy for a human to understand what your code does and why.

Good first issues​

We label some GitHub issues as good first issue for developers who are new to Blockly. These issues are intentionally beginner friendly, well documented, and self-contained.

The purpose of solving a good first issue is to learn about Blockly and the workflows that we use. Therefore, AI should not be used to write code or PR summaries when solving a good first issue. If you have questions about an issue, you can always leave a comment on the issue, and the Blockly team will be happy to assist you.

AI disclosure​

If AI tools were used to create content (such as code, documentation, or configuration) that is submitted as part of a PR, please disclose this in the PR summary. This should simply be a sentence or two describing how, and to what extent, you used the tool.

Enforcement​

Pull requests should always be more beneficial to the library than the time they take to review. The Blockly team may close PRs that violate this policy or are otherwise too lengthy to review efficiently.