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AI Policy

We have this policy so that AI tools make earthaccess more enjoyable to work on, not harder. Reviewer attention and contributor understanding are our scarcest resources. In short: disclose your AI use, understand and be able to explain anything you submit, and don't let an AI agent open a pull request on its own.

"AI" herein refers to generative AI tools like large language models (LLMs) that can generate, edit, and review software code, create and manipulate images, or generate human-like communication.

Scope

This policy applies to contributions from the wider community. Automated processes operated by the earthaccess maintainer team (for example, dependency updates and other repository automations) run under separate maintainer oversight and are not governed by the requirements below.

Responsibility

You are responsible for any code you submit to earthaccess's repositories, regardless of whether it was manually written or generated by AI. You must understand and be able to explain the code you submit as well as the existing related code. It is not acceptable to submit a patch that you cannot understand and explain yourself. In explaining your contribution, do not use AI to automatically generate descriptions.

No autonomous AI agent contributions

The use of an AI agent that writes code and then submits a pull request autonomously is not permitted. A human must check any generated code and open the pull request themselves.

Disclosure

You must disclose whether AI has been used to assist in the development of your pull request. The pull request template includes a disclosure checkbox; please complete it for every pull request, including those where no AI tools were used. If AI has been used, document which tool(s) and version(s) were used, how they were used, and specify what code or text is AI generated. We will reject any pull request that does not include the disclosure.

Disclosure helps reviewers understand and give appropriate attention to your contribution, and keeps our review process transparent. As with any contribution, please make sure you understand anything you submit so you can answer questions that come up during review.

Code Quality

Code generated by AI can be of low quality. Contributors are expected to submit code that meets earthaccess's standards. We will reject pull requests that we deem being "AI slop". Please do not waste developers' time by submitting code that you don't understand or that doesn't meet our standards.

All code in earthaccess is released under the MIT license. Contributors to earthaccess license their code under the same license when it is included into earthaccess's version control repository. That means contributors must own the copyright of any code submitted to earthaccess or must include the MIT-compatible open source license(s) associated with the submitted code in the patch. Code generated by AI may infringe on copyright and it is the submitter's responsibility to not infringe. We reserve the right to reject any pull requests, AI generated or not, where the copyright is in question.

Communication

When interacting with developers (forum, discussions, issues, pull requests, etc.) do not use AI to speak for you, except for translation or grammar editing. If the developers want to chat with a chatbot, they can do so themselves. Human-to-human communication is essential for an open source community to thrive.

Acknowledgements

This policy is adapted from the SciPy developers' AI policy, which is based on the SymPy developers' AI policy. Thanks to both teams.