Discussion for maintainers - on use of AI in repositories

[dsyme]

Since Feb 2026, "fsprojects" policies now allow the use of AI automation like Repo Assist by maintainers and backup maintainers to address issue backlogs and respond to issues.

This is a discussion thread for maintainers of fsprojects projects to give feedback about this. Please indicate in your reply if you are a maintainer or non-maintainer of a repo.

The current position is that it is primarily up to active maintainers to decide whether to use AI assists on their project. Backup maintainers are allowed to use AI automation as follows (effectively making them active AI-assisted maintainers of old stale projects):

🤖 Repo Assist and other AI repo maintainence: Backup maintainers may choose to add automated AI repository assistant such as Repo Assist to "stale" repositories, or propose to add it to "active" repositories (by filing an issue or PR)

On the whole, at time of writing, maintainers who have adopted this have been positive about this. This technique has been used successfully by maintainers as follows

• @dsyme used Repo Assist in FSharp.Control.AsyncSeq, FSharp.Data, FSharp.Control.AsyncSeq to clear the issue backlog and make several major releases

  • Merge rate of Repo Assist proposed PRs - about 80% e.g. see https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharp.Control.AsyncSeq/pulls?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+Repo+Assist+
  • Closure rate of Repo Assist commented backlog issues, either by - high, see https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharp.Control.AsyncSeq/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aclosed%20Repo%20Assist
  • In all these repositories, the

• @dsyme used Repo Assist to revive the very stale https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharp.TypeProviders.SDK, clearing the issue backlog and releasing a new version

• @nojaf used a customized version of Repo Assist on https://github.com/fsprojects/fantomas, to help with maintenance and old issue backlog

• @nojaf and @dsyme used it in FSharp.Formatting for the same purposes. Here more focus was on collaboration between the maintainers

• @Krzysztof-Cieslak and @baronfel used it in the related Ionide/FSharp.AutoComplete positively

At time of writing some other applications are:

• @sergey-tihon using it in SwaggerProvider
• @dsyme and @gdziadkiewicz using it in FSharpx.Collections

This was used unsuccessfully as follows

• @dsyme added it to the stale repo https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharp.Data.SqlClient. However, it immediately became obvious the engineering in the repo was not in a good state, and he worked on an engineering overhaul. This revealed another community member, @daniellittledev , had a different and better engineering overhaul. The use of repo assist was removed and all PRs created closed

There have been some negative reactions by non-maintainers who received automated replies on very old issues.

[dsyme]

Some negative feedback (not from maintainers of the repositories):

• There's a negative reaction from Kasey Speakman here: https://fsharp.slack.com/archives/C04BJKUP2/p1773624369693469

  I got a bot response (6 years later), which I will never want. It appears to have used my comment as a prompt, just repeated what I said, and GPT'd a naive example.

  This was a response to an issue from someone else, which Kasey had answered, and the AI elaborated correctly on the answer Order-respecting Map? FSharpx.Collections#15 (comment)

• There was a negative reaction from Jérémie Chassaing here in SwaggerProvider Add repo assist? SwaggerProvider#293

These need to be taken into account by maintainers, though ultimately it's up to the maintainers.