Contribution Ethics

Contribution Ethics is a skill for Claude Code from costajohnt/oss-autopilot. It costs 70 tokens per session (647 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for AI-assisted contributions to open-source software, including commits, pull requests, and comments that maintainers will see. It explains when a human should answer instead of the AI.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when writing or reviewing commit messages, pull-request descriptions, review replies, and issue comments for open-source projects.
Why use it?
It helps keep contributions honest, respectful, and consistent with project expectations without exposing unnecessary AI-generated wording or claiming credit improperly.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the oss-autopilot plugin — 3 skills, 9 commands, 8 agents, 2 MCP servers shipped together

Good fit Use it when writing or reviewing commit messages, pull-request descriptions, review replies, and issue comments for open-source projects.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/contribution-ethics
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add costajohnt/oss-autopilot --skill contribution-ethics
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/costajohnt/oss-autopilot

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install oss-autopilot, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 9 commands, 8 agents, 2 MCP servers.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for Contribution Ethics

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/contribution-ethics/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/contribution-ethics)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/contribution-ethics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/contribution-ethics/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for Contribution Ethics

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/contribution-ethics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/costajohnt/oss-autopilot/contribution-ethics.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 647 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00070 $0.00647
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.00324
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00129
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00065

Measured 9d ago against content hash db692ecf276c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Contribution Ethics scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/contribution-ethics/SKILL.md · 62 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 62 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Contribution Ethics

How to behave ethically when contributing to OSS as an AI-assisted contributor: attribution, AI-tell avoidance in maintainer-visible writing, and knowing when to defer to a human.

Attribution

Do

  • Attribute work properly (co-authors for human pair work)
  • Give credit to human contributors in PR descriptions
  • Share knowledge with other contributors

Don't

Add AI attribution to commits or PRs:

  • No Co-Authored-By: Claude trailers
  • No "Generated with Claude Code" in PR descriptions
  • No robot emoji attributions
  • No mentions of AI assistance in comments

These rules are absolute. Contributions submitted to upstream repos must appear as solely from the human contributor unless that repo's contribution guidelines explicitly require AI disclosure.

Other related "don't"s:

  • Claim credit for others' work
  • Submit low-quality PRs just for contribution graphs
  • Spam repos with trivial changes

AI-Tell Avoidance in Writing

AI-generated comments have recognizable patterns. Avoid these in any maintainer-visible writing (PR descriptions, review responses, issue comments):

  • No changelogs in comments. "Changes in the latest commit:" with bullet points is a dead giveaway. Describe what you did in a sentence, or let the diff speak.
  • Vary your openings. Don't start every response with "Thanks for the review!" or "Good catch!" Sometimes just jump to the substance.
  • Match their length. If the maintainer wrote two sentences, don't respond with four paragraphs.
  • Read the whole thread first. Asking about something explained three comments up is the fastest way to lose credibility.
  • Mean what you say. Don't defend a position then immediately abandon it. Push back or agree — pick one.
  • Figure things out yourself. If a maintainer says "add a screenshot," look at existing examples. Don't ask them to explain the tooling.

When to Defer to the Human Contributor

Some situations require the human contributor, not an AI tool:

Read the full file on GitHub · 62 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 62 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A db692ecf276c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Contribution Ethics is a skill published in the GitHub repository costajohnt/oss-autopilot (13 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 647 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.