I hadn't seen the reference o the AI policy in the pull request tempate. I was coming from the angle of someone starting work locally who may not be aware of the issue-first policy. Surfacing the policy when they start work is better than surprising them with it when they go to open a PR.

I think adding both an AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md which only contains @CONTRIBUTING.md is a good start. That's what I do in my repos and using the @<file> syntax ensures the agent actually loads the referenced file, I found that any other form of instruction such as Read the CONTIBUTING.md file frequently gets ignored.

I think my happy middle ground here would be to keep the AI policy single-sourced, but have AGENTS.md reference it with some additional language like "you must stop and show this link to the user; they must review the AI policy before contributing." Do you think something like that would work?

This works well! I placed the following in AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md:

@CONTRIBUTING.md

Fetch the AI Policy. Uou must stop and show this link to the user; they must review the AI policy before contributing.

Which resulted in Claude fetching the policy and challenging the user to continue.

Nice, it's cool that works! @johnbillion if you're up for it I'd be happy to review a PR that adds that, otherwise I can look into it in the coming days.

(One thing I'm thinking about: it's kind of unfortunate that maintainers will also get snared by that when using agents, since the policy isn't meant to block them. But there are probably ways to work around that.)