AI contribution policy: release-1.8 adoption review

[Lee Yarwood]

Hello all,

During the v1.8.0 development cycle we introduced an AI contribution
policy [1] asking contributors to attribute AI-assisted work using git
trailers. Now that the release-1.8 branch is cut, I've used claude to
run an initial review of how the policy was adopted across the 738
non-merge commits in the release-1.7..release-1.8 range. The report is
available below:

https://github.com/lyarwood/kubevirt/blob/fe7caf384340ecf83e37fb57e29e9e02641ef03f/ai-attribution-review-release-1.8.md

76 commits (10.3%) from 15 distinct contributors carry AI attribution.
Claude is the dominant tool at ~83% of attributed instances, with
Cursor making up the remainder. No other AI tools (Copilot, Codex,
Gemini, ChatGPT, etc.) were attributed. The vast majority of
AI-attributed commits (98.7%) come from Red Hat engineers.

On the quality side, AI-attributed PRs are performing on par with
non-AI contributions by every review metric we can measure. The rate
of "changes requested" reviews is identical at 9% for both groups.
Merge times are comparable and, when controlled for PR size, medium AI
PRs actually merge faster (8.7 vs 13.0 days). AI tooling is being used
for substantial work — 7 of the 35 AI PRs implement approved VEPs, and
the most common categories are feature development, test improvements,
and refactoring rather than trivial or mechanical changes.

Thoughts and comments are welcome. I'll review the improvements
suggested in the report over the coming weeks to see how we can
further enhance our tracking and use these AI tools in the project
during the v1.9.0 cycle.

Cheers,

Lee

[1] https://github.com/kubevirt/community/blob/main/ai-contribution-policy.md