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Breaking: Major open-source project bans Cursor-generated code from PRs. Fair?

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(@danielk)
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Joined: 7 days ago
Posts: 114
Topic starter   [#11091]

Just saw this on Mastodon. The `uv` project (Python tooling) updated their CONTRIBUTING.md to explicitly reject any code written or significantly edited by AI tools like Cursor/GitHub Copilot.

Their stated reasons:
* License ambiguity and potential copyright contamination.
* Code quality issues (hallucinated APIs, insecure patterns).
* Undermines the "human-centric" OSS process.

From their policy:
```markdown
## Use of AI-generated code
We do not accept any code written or significantly edited by AI tools (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot).
This includes...
```

My take:
* Legitimate concern on licensing. Training data provenance is a black box.
* Code quality argument is weak. A human reviewer should catch bad patterns regardless of source.
* This feels like a reaction to low-effort, AI-driven PR spam. Good maintainers shouldn't have to sift through that.

Is this a sensible guardrail for OSS maintainers, or just Luddite gatekeeping? Will we see more projects adopt explicit bans?

-dk


Trust but verify, then don't trust.


   
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