AI Usage

You Own Your Output

AI tools make you faster. But speed without direction takes you further from the target, not closer. Before reaching for AI, make sure you know where you’re going. A clear goal, a well-understood problem, and sound judgement are prerequisites — AI amplifies whatever you feed it, including confusion.

You are accountable for everything you produce, whether you wrote it by hand or an AI drafted it. “The AI got it wrong” is not an explanation. If your name is on it, you verified it.

When AI Helps

AI is a powerful tool for:

• Drafting boilerplate code, templates, or scaffolding
• Polishing your own writing — grammar, clarity, conciseness
• Exploring options, prototypes, and alternatives quickly
• Reviewing your own work before asking a human to review it (see Merge Requests )

When AI Hurts

AI should not replace your thinking. Watch out for these patterns:

• Porridge content: AI tends to produce text that sounds fluent but says very little. It is hard to read, hard to act on, and wastes other people’s time. If you wouldn’t write it yourself, don’t paste it.
• Bloated comments and issues: GitLab comments and issue descriptions should reflect your reasoning, not an AI’s. Others need to understand what you thought and why. You can use AI to polish your own writing — as long as it doesn’t change the meaning or make the text longer than necessary.
• False confidence: AI can produce plausible-sounding but wrong answers. Verify facts, check code, and test assumptions before sharing anything AI-generated.
• Skipping understanding: If you use AI to produce something you don’t fully understand, you cannot defend it, debug it, or improve it. That’s a liability, not a shortcut.

The Rule

Review everything you share — internally and externally — before exposing it to others.

Read it as if you were the recipient. Ask yourself:

• Is the context clear?
• Is this my reasoning or AI filler?
• Would I be comfortable defending every claim in this text?
• Is it as short as it can be while still being complete?

If the answer to any of these is no, rewrite it.