Vapor's AI Policy

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000
ai, policy, governance

Vapor's adopting a policy for AI contributions and AI agents to ensure we grow sustainably.

Today we’re releasing our AI Policy for Vapor in the form of an AGENTS.md file. The growth of AI-assisted coding has accelerated recently, and over the last few weeks we’ve seen an influx of PRs clearly from AI agents with multiple PRs for the same issue, even from the same account!

If we suspect a PR, issue, or security advisory is written without any human input, we will close it without any discussion. People are going to use AI to help them code, but you should understand what it’s doing. Be prepared to answer questions!

Whilst views on AI coding are contentious (even among Vapor maintainers!), there are two main issues we’re hoping to solve.

Maintainer Burnout

Running an open source project is hard work and maintainer burnout is a real thing. Dealing with a surge of issues and PRs to triage and review, especially in the midst of working on Vapor 5, is a massive time sink. If every submission was high quality and unique, it would be a net benefit. But seeing yet another PR for the same issue is not a productive use of time.

Encouraging Contributions

Vapor has a couple of labels we use to triage issues - good-first-issue and help-wanted. These are issues that would be useful to solve, non-urgent and a good way for people to contribute. The good first issue label especially is designed for beginner issues that don’t require much understanding of the project and should be an easy way for people to start contributing if they want to get involved. We want to build a healthy project after all! Unfortunately these issues especially get picked up by AI agents, which defeats the purpose.

Moving Forward

None of these are problems unique for Vapor. Open source is certainly struggling across all projects, including curl closing its bug bounty program and an AI agent writing personalised attacks on maintainers. Hopefully this will keep Vapor maintainable and sustainable.