Collaborator-Only Pull Requests

The What

Permission to open a pull request has been restricted to maintainers and those with the collaborator ("write") role.

The Why

AI tools have made it all too easy to create low-effort, plausible-looking pull requests. These patches often address one very specific issue, but regress many other uses of the tree-sitter project. This leaves too much of the burden of testing, benchmarking, and evaluation on tree-sitter's very limited maintainer team. Following some internal discussion the team has decided to restrict unsolicited outside contributions, aiming to reduce the maintainer burden while still allowing high quality work in.

Can I Still Contribute?

Yes, quality outside contribution is still welcome; we just need to be sure that both the design and the broad implementation align with the project goals -- and that the contributor is able by themselves to reason about these -- before a massive pull request is opened. This means:

1. All changes, whether bug fixes or new features, must start with an issue describing the desired change.
2. If the change is deemed in scope (i.e., the issue is not closed) and you are interested in implementing it, add a comment outlining the proposed implementation. Make sure to adhere to the AI policy, especially around direct insertion of LLM output.
3. Once an acceptable design has been agreed upon and maintainers trust you to implement it, go ahead and link the corresponding branch from your fork in a comment once you have a working proof of concept. A collaborator will then take a look and -- if it meets expectations -- open a PR from this branch (which should not be the default branch!) and iterate on that.

(Of course, the amount of discussion and expectations depend on the size of the proposed change; e.g., simple bugfixes can be proposed directly.)

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We realize this is likely a controversial and discouraging change in project policy. The current path of tree-sitter's development, however, is not tenable. The ultimate goal has been and continues to be to develop tree-sitter to be the best project it can be. This is an experiment, and adjustments will be made as needed.