[ai-control] Re: Proposal: AI Preference Attachments for Source Code and VCS (Seeking Co-editors)

[John Mueller <[e-mail]>]

I'm glad there's work being done for repos, thanks for sharing!

How can a generic crawler recognize that it's crawling a software
repository? Would it need to parse any text file for these strings? (or are
there existing mechanisms that make this a non-issue?)

Cheers
John


On Mon, Mar 30, 2026 at 3:22 PM Felix Reda <felixreda=
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Dear Thomas,
>
> Thanks a lot for driving this work forward. I had the opportunity to
> comment on an early draft of this proposal and I support its approach.
> Software code has particularities that require a different approach from
> robots.txt, as developers rarely have access to the robots.txt file of the
> domains through which their code is distributed. At the same time, I really
> appreciate that this proposal focuses on the attachment mechanism and is
> open to adopting any vocabulary of preferences that this working group is
> ultimately going to agree on.
>
> As regards to the question of the working group charter, I am not 100%
> sure, because the description of the charter supports this work ("The
> Working Group will focus on attaching preferences to content either by
> including preferences in content metadata or by signaling preferences using
> the protocol that delivers content"), while the deliverables are more
> narrowly tailored to "means of attaching or associating those preferences
> with content in IETF-defined protocols and formats“. Perhaps the chairs can
> provide clarity here.
>
> Either way, without wanting to distract one bit from the important work on
> the vocabulary, I hope members of this group with an interest in software
> preferences will engage with the proposal and help develop it.
>
> Best,
> Felix
>
> *From: *Thomas Aynaud <[e-mail]>
> *Date: *Monday, 30. March 2026 at 09:54
> *To: *[e-mail] <[e-mail]>
> *Subject: *[EXTERNAL] [ai-control] Proposal: AI Preference Attachments
> for Source Code and VCS (Seeking Co-editors)
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> As the working group continues to make excellent progress on
> draft-ietf-aipref-attach, we’ve been looking closely at how to apply these
> mechanisms to software source code and version control systems.
>
> In Section 1.3.1 of the current attachment draft, it is noted that
> embedding preferences directly into content is highly effective but
> requires format-specific methods. We believe source code fits precisely
> into this scope.
>
> A fundamental difference between source code and other media is how
> copyright owners traditionally communicate usage rights. In the software
> ecosystem, there is a decades-long precedent of declaring reuse permissions
> inside the artifact itself (e.g., via LICENSE files or SPDX headers).
>
> If an AI preference is declared exclusively via the Content-Usage HTTP
> header (Section 2) or robots.txt (Section 3), it does not follow this
> established developer workflow. Furthermore, because code is distributed
> via git clone, package managers, or archive downloads, transport-layer
> metadata is inherently stripped. The preference vanishes the moment the
> repository is cloned, or used in any of the various phases of software
> development, not to mention vendoring.
>
> To bridge this gap, Software Heritage and partners that are involved in
> the CodeCommons project (see https://codecommons.org) have drafted a
> specification for an in-repository attachment mechanism that survives at
> rest.
>
> Working Specification:
> https://gitlab.softwareheritage.org/teams/codecommons/cc-public-resources/-/tree/main/specifications/aiprefs
>
> We are bringing this to the list with two goals:
>
> 1. To get the working group's initial feedback on the technical approach
> of an in-repo file constraint.
> 2. To ask if this software-specific attachment mechanism is within the
> scope of the IETF working group, and if so, whether anyone with experience
> authoring IETF drafts would be interested in co-editing this document with
> us. We have the core specification mapped out in GitLab, but we would
> greatly appreciate a co-editor to help translate this into the formal IETF
> XML/RFC format for an official -00 submission. If the chairs conclude that
> this proposal is outside the scope of the AIPREF working group, we would
> appreciate advice on appropriate venues to advance this specification.
>
> Thanks for your time and the great work on the core drafts so far,
>
> --
> Thomas Aynaud
>
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