- Feature Name: N/A
- Start Date: 2026-03-13
- RFC PR: rust-lang/rfcs#3936
- Issue: rust-lang/leadership-council#273
We adopt a no low-effort contributions policy for the Rust Project.
Contributions refer to pull requests, issues, proposals, and comments.
- Effort: If you're not putting in the same level of effort a maintainer will have to put in to review it, then you're not adding value. This level varies by the task and by the cost of review, but it's never less than being careful and thoughtful.
- Accountability: We hold you responsible for everything you send to us. We expect you to understand it and be able to explain it. We expect you to check it carefully. Respect our time.
- Compassion: In taking the time to answer your questions and review what you've proposed, we're making an investment in you. We want to make you better able to help us. Keep that in mind when we're offering feedback. Listen carefully. Reflect on it. Reply to us compassionately. We're trying to help; making our maintainers feel bad about that leads to burnout.
Contributions that fail to satisfy these criteria are low-effort contributions.
Maintainers and moderators are not required to put effort into explaining rejection of low-effort contributions.
- Fully AI-generated and not carefully self-reviewed contributions are low-effort.
- These are informally known as "slop" or as "vibecoding".
- These include those produced by OpenClaw or similar tools.
- Code, PR descriptions, bug reports, proposals, and comments are all low-effort if fully-generated and not carefully self-reviewed.
- Feeding maintainer questions into AI tools and then proxying the output directly back to the reviewer is low-effort and lacks compassion.
This list is nonexhaustive.