Skip to content

AI support for contributors - #1042

Open
mk-mxp wants to merge 2 commits into
exercism:mainfrom
mk-mxp:ai-support
Open

AI support for contributors#1042
mk-mxp wants to merge 2 commits into
exercism:mainfrom
mk-mxp:ai-support

Conversation

@mk-mxp

@mk-mxp mk-mxp commented Aug 2, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

I am not sure, if we should add these. If we decide not to help contributors with using AI for contributions, I'm OK with that.

A main instructions file for the track's day-to-day work, and one for the contribution tooling. It saves a few tokens for the future.

And a minor fix for the PHP version range documented in README, nothing functional.

@mk-mxp
mk-mxp requested a review from homersimpsons August 2, 2026 14:53
@mk-mxp mk-mxp self-assigned this Aug 2, 2026
@mk-mxp mk-mxp added x:action/improve Improve existing functionality/content x:knowledge/elementary Little Exercism knowledge required x:type/coding Write code that is not student-facing content (e.g. test-runners, generators, but not exercises) x:size/tiny Tiny amount of work x:rep/tiny Tiny amount of reputation labels Aug 2, 2026
Comment thread CLAUDE.md

@homersimpsons homersimpsons Aug 3, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

While I personally find a lot of issues with LLM outputs quality (and their societal / environmental impacts). I'm not completely against introducing this. BUT:

  1. I would prefer AGENTS.md (over CLAUDE.md) to avoid favouring (in terms of visibility) any AI provider. I know that @iHiD uses Claude though.
  2. I would prefer we use no files if the informations are relevant for humans too. In which case we should seek concise writing and use classical README.md / CONTRIBUTING.md files
  3. Similarly I would not gitignore the local LLM files, in my opinion the developers should ignore them globally instead. Though if we face a lot of good quality merge requests with local files included I will reconsider adding it.

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor Author

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

I'm not a fan of LLMs, too. I currently learn to use them (as we all have to), and a project without agent supporting files burns a lot more tokens (energy) than a project with them. Contributors use them anyways already, so let's save some tokens here.

To 1: I know, that Claude does not read AGENTS.md on purpose. That's a shame, but they are current market leaders (people urged to use Copilot for free on GitHub is no market share). I do not have another coding agent at hand to test support (cursor et al.). So, I can only reliably provide Claude information and supporting files.

To 2: Agent files are auto-generated and maintained by the agents. They read the README and code, and write their prose to safe tokens for the future. I do not intend to remove / reduce human first information anywhere.

To 3: gitignoring local agent files is common practice like .env.local.* already are. Especially with the many CDEs (like GitHub codespaces) global settings are unreliable. They also may contain security information (like tokens, keys for MCPs), as they are personal files.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

x:action/improve Improve existing functionality/content x:knowledge/elementary Little Exercism knowledge required x:rep/tiny Tiny amount of reputation x:size/tiny Tiny amount of work x:type/coding Write code that is not student-facing content (e.g. test-runners, generators, but not exercises)

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants