AI use for development?

[Chud]

Out of curiosity, how much are the active maintainers using AI here these days?

Quite a few years ago I stuck my toe in the water for helping out with bug fixes, to-do items in the code, etc. but it soon became evident that my available time combined with the level of my C chops meant that I wasn't going to be much help. More recently though I've been using Claude to help write code for various small things at work, and I've been impressed with its results (though they aren't good enough not to require oversight yet).

[agoodman]

as the borg guy (I think "maintainer" is too strong a word for me... I am not in the same sort of category as Nick or Eric) I can say that I don't use AI in coding the borg at all. I probably should but I am stubborn and obstinate plus I find hand coding more fun.

[Nick]

That goes pretty much exactly for me too

[JoseMachete]

My very utterly humble two cents as a variant dev, no AI for me. Just not my thing. Might be a tool I'm missing but I don't care.

[chem]

would the developers object if, at the official github, people contributed to analysis of existing issues, submission of new issues, or PRs using frontier AI models such as opus 4.8 or gpt 5.5? have you considered adding an AGENTS.md file with specific instructions for agents working with the repo? it could be similar, in part, to CONTRIBUTING.md, but with agent-specific instructions, or CONTRIBUTING.md could add a section relating to how you want agents to work with the codebase.

I just want to see angband keep going another few decades and it seems ai-assisted coding will inevitably impact this project too. may as well decide how to address it. if AI agents working with the repo is forbidden, that's worth stating too.

[backwardsEric]

I have three concerns about agents making more or less unsupervised contributions to the GitHub repository:

• If it turns into a flood of comments or pull requests, then that will exhaust the real humans who are active there.
• https://github.com/hengband/hengband has had automated reviews of pull requests for a while now, and I have not found that to be particularly helpful. I remain uncertain about how to meaningfully respond to a bot's review and, in most cases, that means I do not respond and wait for one of Hengband's human contributors to chime in. If other people act the same way in response to agents making comments or pull requests on Angband's repository, the agents will not be helping the conversation.
• For patches or pull requests, I do not know how copyright law treats non-human authors. Implicitly, the author of a patch or pull request is agreeing to have the work distributed under the terms of Angband's license. Does an agent understand that license? Can it be said to have legally agreed to the terms? Could it render a deposition about how the work was authored and what other sources were consulted?

Given those concerns, I would lean towards forbidding agents.

[Nick]

I'd add that Angband has not traditionally reacted to new trends hastily, I think we can afford to wait a bit and see how this all plays out.