I have re-ordered a bit, and separated out the principles, an itemised the four things that could reasonably count as "policies".

I'm genuniely unsure about length.  Conveying a nuanced message accurately requires words.  I hope that the extra structure helps.

Simon

On Mon, 13 Jul 2026 at 14:59, Norman Ramsey <nr@cs.tufts.edu> wrote:
 > I would welcome constructive feedback on it.

Agreed that it's too long.

  - Separate Principles from Policy.

  - The operational meat is right here:

    > Reviewer time is even more limited than contributor time, so we
    > expect you to have invested significantly more time in your
    > contribution than it will take to review.  As well as writing
    > the payload itself (code, documentation, tests), we ask you to
    > invest time in making your contribution easy to review. It is
    > much easier to review an MR that has a clearly articulated goal
    > has a clearly explained design, often expressed in an overview
    > Note is illustrated with insightful examples has good test cases
    > In short, we expect you to have invested significant time in
    > your contribution before you ask others to invest their free
    > time to review and improve it.

    Lead with that.

  - The other key operational policy is the identifiable human author.


If you want potential contributors to read the document, I suggest
leading with those two policy items, then boiling the rest down to two
bulleted lists: recommended and anti-recommended ways to use LLMs.

I warmly endorse the principles, but they may belong elsewhere.


Norman