Vouch GitHub Action to handle AI slop and low-quality comments and PRs

stevepiercy · February 8, 2026, 3:37am

As someone who's tired of playing whack-a-mole with low-quality comments and PRs, there's a recently announced project called Vouch.

From GitHub - mitchellh/vouch: A contributor trust management system based on explicit vouches to participate.

Open source has always worked on a system of trust and verify.

Historically, the effort required to understand a codebase, implement a change, and submit that change for review was high enough that it naturally filtered out many low quality contributions from unqualified people. For over 20 years of my life, this was enough for my projects as well as enough for most others.

Unfortunately, the landscape has changed particularly with the advent of AI tools that allow people to trivially create plausible-looking but extremely low-quality contributions with little to no true understanding. Contributors can no longer be trusted based on the minimal barrier to entry to simply submit a change.

But, open source still works on trust! And every project has a definite group of trusted individuals (maintainers) and a larger group of probably trusted individuals (active members of the community in any form). So, let's move to an explicit trust model where trusted individuals can vouch for others, and those vouched individuals can then contribute.

The author has implemented Vouch for their project Ghostty, which has an AI usage policy worth reading.

github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty

AI_POLICY.md

main

# AI Usage Policy

The Ghostty project has strict rules for AI usage:

- **All AI usage in any form must be disclosed.** You must state
  the tool you used (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Amp) along with
  the extent that the work was AI-assisted.

- **Pull requests created in any way by AI can only be for accepted issues.**
  Drive-by pull requests that do not reference an accepted issue will be
  closed. If AI isn't disclosed but a maintainer suspects its use, the
  PR will be closed. If you want to share code for a non-accepted issue,
  open a discussion or attach it to an existing discussion.

- **Pull requests created by AI must have been fully verified with
  human use.** AI must not create hypothetically correct code that
  hasn't been tested. Importantly, you must not allow AI to write
  code for platforms or environments you don't have access to manually
  test on.

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manaskng · February 10, 2026, 3:49am

I saw this other day and was going to share this as well. Are there any plans to implement this in one of the repos? Since it's you who proposed this @stevepiercy we could start with docs?

davisagli · February 10, 2026, 6:47am

I like that AI policy a lot!