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title: How to Contribute
category: Development
order: 1
---

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![Contributing](/docs/one-person-is-handling-a-box-for-the-other-over.webp)

If you're reading this, you're likely an open source fan, which is awesome. Thank you for your interest in contributing to our project. ❤️

## 👋 Talk to Us First!

Archestra is a project with a full-time core team. While we work hard to make our plans and ideas public, we highly recommend saying "Hi!" to us before you start working on the codebase. There are two main reasons for this:

1.  We might already have designs or plans related to your idea.
2.  We can support you during the idea stage, which is much more effective than providing feedback after you've already written the code.

You can find the entire development team in our [Slack Community](https://archestra.ai/join-slack). Just post a message in the **#general** channel! If you're not sure what to write, here’s a helpful template:

> Hey, my name is {your name}, and I would love to work on {your idea}!

That's it! Taking this simple first step gets you 95% of the way there. Our engineers will jump into the conversation, greet you, and share any relevant context to get you started.

Before you can comment, open issues, or open PRs, go through [contributor onboarding](https://archestra.ai/contributor-onboard). Takes about 60 seconds.

## 🤝 Contribute Responsibly

We encourage the use of AI tools while working on your contribution! However, as always, and especially in the AI era, it's essential to emphasize that the project benefits only from contributions made at a certain level of quality.

We sometimes have to reject contributions that show signs of unreviewed AI-generated code, such as:

1. Massive AI-generated descriptions and comments.
2. Code that doesn't follow the existing patterns and conventions of the project.
3. Code that doesn't follow reasonable clean code best practices.
4. Code that was not tested before contribution.
5. Or other noticeable signs of rushed or unreviewed AI generation.

From our perspective, carefully reviewing such a contribution can take longer than implementing the feature ourselves. For this reason, we may close the pull request. If this happens to you, please don't be discouraged. We kindly ask that you rework your changes and reopen the pull request when you're ready.

## Bounties

We use bounties as an optional way to thank contributors for meaningful work. They are not contract jobs, and they do not replace coordination with maintainers and other contributors.

Respect assigned work. If an issue already has an assigned contributor, do not open a competing pull request, comment `/attempt`, or otherwise try to take over the bounty. Bots or users that try to steal already assigned bounties will be banned from the repository.

We have to enforce this because irresponsible use of AI bots has made it much easier to spam issues and disrupt contributors who are already doing the work. We wrote more about this in [Let's talk about AI slop](https://archestra.ai/blog/only-responsible-ai). Use AI responsibly, communicate clearly, and help keep the project a high-effort engineering space. ❤️
