Contributor Responsibility and Review Cost in the Age of Code Generation

hiya! this is my first post here. I’d like to start a discussion about contributor responsibility and review cost in the context of AI-assisted code generation

There have been periodic discussions about whether Rust should regulate or restrict AI-assisted contributions. I want to argue that this framing is both unenforceable and unnecessary

It is not possible to reliably determine whether a contribution was generated by a human, an AI, or a mixture of tools. Attempting to regulate usage rather than outcomes incentivizes superficial compliance and does not scale.

Instead, I propose that Rust explicitly treat review cost and contributor responsibility as first-class concerns:

• Contributors are fully responsible for the correctness, safety, licensing, and maintainability of any code they submit, regardless of tooling used.
• All contributions must be human-readable and explainable by the submitter.
• Review time is a limited resource; submissions that impose excessive review cost may be rejected on that basis alone.
• Repeatedly submitting low-signal or high-cost changes should lead to escalating consequences.

This mirrors long-standing open-source norms: tools do not submit patches, people do. If a contributor cannot justify or maintain generated output, that output does not belong in the project. This approach avoids unenforceable tool policing while preserving Rust’s standards for correctness and long-term maintainability. I’m interested in feedback on whether this framing would be a useful clarification of existing norms, and whether it should eventually be formalized as contribution guidance or policy.