Navigating Drupal’s AI Contribution Policy: A View from the Review Queue

​Whether it’s your employer, your clients, or your favorite open source project, we all have AI policies to navigate now. Drupal has one too, and it was written with a lot of care for both contributors and the people who review their work.

In this session, Stephen Mustgrave joins us to introduce the policy on the use of AI when contributing to Drupal. Stephen has led the Needs Review Queue Initiative for several years, checking in on Drupal core issues as they reach “needs review.” That gives him a front-row view of what helps an issue move forward and what slows it down.

We’ll start with the why. Committers are responsible for the codebase, and they need to understand every change they commit. Every contribution to an issue should help clarify the problem and the proposed solution. AI-generated summaries can add cognitive load for reviewers and, even when the contributor understands the change perfectly well, they don’t show it. The result is that the work of understanding shifts onto someone else.

Then we’ll get practical:

What the policy asks of contributors
- The updated issue summary templates, including the new section for AI output
- Why reviewers ask for summaries written in your own words, and what makes a good one
- How to ask AI to explain a solution so you understand it well enough to describe it yourself

We’re coming at this from a place of enthusiasm. AI tools have made it possible for more people to contribute to Drupal, and that energy is a good thing. Let’s talk about how to channel it into contributions that move issues forward and keep everyone in the chain, from contributor to reviewer to committer, on the same page.

Bring your questions and your own policies too. If you maintain contributed projects, we’d love to hear how you’re handling AI-assisted contributions.