Your PR was written by an AI. We don’t care. (But we do have rules.)

Last year, a community member built two complete oCIS (ownCloud Infinite Scale) web extensions, a photo gallery and an advanced search, without writing a single line of code manually:

• Architecture conversations with Claude.
• Scaffolding generated by Claude Code.
• Implementation through iterative prompting.
• Debugging via browser DevTools screenshots pasted into the chat.

The extensions passed review. They were merged. They work in oCIS 8.0.

We published the full workflow as a guide on owncloud.dev. That guide is the foundation for our AI-Assisted Contribution Policy, launching May 5th.

The policy:
We welcome AI-assisted contributions. We do not reject PRs because an AI wrote the code. We do not require contributors to be „senior developers.“ We do not gatekeep based on how you created the work. Because beautiful things should not require a CS degree, and the right to build was never supposed to belong only to those who already know how. We lost a lot of ideas in that gap. The code doesn’t need to be pretty. But the thing it does? Needs to be beautiful (and enterprise ready).

Four rules:

1. Disclosure. Tell us in the PR description that you used AI tools. Name the tool. This isn’t stigma. It’s transparency.
2. Comprehension. You must understand what the code does. „The AI wrote it“ is not an answer to a reviewer’s question. You’re the author. The AI is your tool.
3. Testing. Unit tests for logic. Manual testing for UI. PRs without test coverage come back.
4. Code quality. AI-generated code accumulates cruft. Run a cleanup pass before submitting. Our CI lints.

The philosophical point:
Great ideas should not be blocked by someone’s programming seniority. The review bar doesn’t change.
How the code got written is not our concern. That it meets the standard is.

Tomorrow: a governance charter for people who’ve been burned before.

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This is part 7 of this blog post series.
See the earlier posts:

1. A (re)-introduction to the ownCloud community
2. What happens when you fork twice, get acquired, and keep shipping anyway
3. We killed our own CLA. Here’s why that’s a good thing
4. PHP 8.3. Yes, for Classic. Yes, we heard you
5. What 108 repositories taught us about open source hygiene
6. I’m a script kid running an OSPO. That’s the point