MNT Add tickboxes for AI disclosure in PR template - #34677

A few weeks ago we switched from tickboxes to a list. The reasoning was that the tickboxes look like open todo items in the overview. I continue to prefer list over tickboxes.

There was some discussion in the PR #34062

I thought that it was obvious that you should remove what doesn't apply. It seems most people do that? Or maybe there are more people than I think that didn't use AI for everything. Maybe there is something we can do to improve the "please remove the things that don't apply" instruction?

Right of course I didn't search the issue tracker for an explanation 😅, I mean who has time for this 😜. Yeah the tasks thing is mildly annoying altough I personally don't pay much attention to it to decide whether a PR is ready for review or not.

Maybe adding a guidance like "only keep the lines below that apply" (in the text not only the commented markdown) would be more explicit? Not 100% sure, maybe too heavy?

I am actually fine with adding a 5th "fun" line like "Sorry didn't bother reading until here so I kept this line" or something along the lines that was suggested by @jeremiedbb in #34062 (comment).

I am also more than happy to close this PR.

Basically I saw this PR from Marco #34527 and I was confused what this meant. I thought "surely he hasn't used AI for everything", and "what does it even mean if nothing is ticked?". Probably he hasn't bother reading the AI disclosure template, like a lot of reasonable people ...

I think there is also an option to have a PR template like the issue template where you fill separate boxes, but I am personally not a fan of this ...

Probably he hasn't bother reading the AI disclosure template

Guilty as charged, sorry 😳 will address

Looking at the pyrefly PR makes me think that Marco skipped 90% of the template :D It would be interesting to hear why.

My suspicion is that the template is quite long already so people write something at the top and then their eyes glaze over. They don't even take the time to delete "all that stuff I didn't read". Let's see if this is a factor for Marco. If it is, I'd use it as argument for why we should not add more instructions to the template ("delete the lines that don't apply")

It would be interesting to hear why.

I can't remember my exact thought process, but it was probably that it looked quite long (doesn't fit on one page on my screen, I'd have needed to scroll down to get to the AI disclosure part) and it looked mostly informational (it starts with "🙌 Thanks for contributing a pull request! 👀 Please ensure you have taken a look at the contribution guidelines:"), and I'd contributed before, so I probably figured it was OK to skip

Sorry about that, I shouldn't have made such assumptions

But yes, big +1 to keeping things short and to-the-point. Not that this excuses my laziness, but I think most people are more likely to read through something if it fits on one page. Screenshot to demonstrate what it looks like for me (note that AI disclosure doesn't appear unless you scroll down)

Thanks for the feedback! It is interesting to hear from people where we can assume that they didn't skip things because "they are evil" or "I'm just here to game my github stats" or $insertYourIdeaOnMaliciousUser. We should be tuning for the well meaning user like you :D

Looking at @MarcoGorelli's comment and the screenshot above, maybe we can remove the intro comment from the template, now that we have the welcome message action, to keep the template more focussed on action items?

I am going to close my PR, now that I understood there was a reason there was no tick boxes in the first place.

This has turned into "how do we make the PR template shorter/better" which I think is definitely valuable, feel free to continue the discussion in a separate PR or issue!