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[docs] add Automated Contribution policy, add Contributing docs to the website #7434

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jameslamb opened 2:21pm on September 13, 2026 wants to merge 45 Ξ” into microsoft/lightgbm main from
docs/automated-contribution-policy
jameslamb authored
of work during September 13
Diff Delta:
45
About 25 Diff Delta/hour
Classified as:  Bug Fix, Feature Add, General

jameslamb's Description of Work

I've been doing the majority of the issue triage and PR review in this repo over the last year, and in that time I've seen a lot of the same problematic things many other open source maintainers have been experiencing with the mass adoption of AI coding agents.


  • low-effort PRs from new contributors who just told an AI system "open a PR that fixes<issue link>"

  • AI-generated PRs trying to compromise the project's security

  • contributors suddenly closing PRs and disappearing in response to a thoughtful review I spent significant time on

  • contributors pasting raw LLM output back at me without clearly stating that

This PR proposes formalizing some of the policies I personally have been applying into something written in LightGBM's documentation. Hoping that that will reduce the effort to deal with such things (can just link to a policy), and that this PR can be a place where we (LightGBM maintainers) can come to a consensus about how we all want to approach these things.

Notes for Reviewers

How I tested this

Enabled readthedocs builds on this branch.

docs: https://lightgbm.readthedocs.io/en/docs-automated-contribution-policy/CONTRIBUTING.html

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