More and more of writing by all humans, including BIP proposers, will inevitably involve AI in some more or less significant way. I don't expect people to reliably express the degree to which AI was used to inform the thinking behind the BIP, or the writing itself. I'm not aware of any common standard we would use to express those things. Adversarially, we have to assume people won't do it if it's not in their interests. 

Rather, I think the expectation should be that BIP proposers are entirely responsible for submitting high quality BIPs and they take ownership for what they are submitting (submitting garbage burns your rep, always has and always will). BIP reviewers should simply assume for all BIPs that AI was likely used significantly to create them, and judge BIPs only on the merit of the ideas and content. 

Because of the advent of LLMs (and their inevitable continued improvement) this will almost certainly result in an increased number of BIPs being advanced, many of low (slop-filled) quality but also, hopefully, more high quality ones as well—proposals that might not otherwise have seen the light of day and/or proposals themselves being strengthened with better arguments, ideas and language. 

The solution to such a rise in volume IMO is that BIP reviewers should also equip themselves with LLMs and other AI-powered tools to help filter/triage/assess BIPs to get a handle on the rise in noise level. Yet, just like BIP proposers, the onus should be on BIP reviewers to take ownership for the quality of the decision-making around BIP quality and that it not ever be entirely automated but retain "human in the loop" judgment—at least for the foreseeable future—just made more efficient and effective through the use of AI. 

On Thu, Nov 20, 2025 at 1:47 AM Oghenovo Usiwoma <eunovo9@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it makes sense to request that submissions should state if - and to what degree - AI has been used. It's reasonable to expect fewer eyeballs on AI generated submissions as they're so easily generated and their potential for wasting reviewer time is high.

In my humble opinion, I believe that humans will continue to use the easiest method available to them to achieve their goals. If we agree that humans will do this, then there will be a lot of AI-assited content. If I did write an AI-assited BIP draft, why would I add this "AI-label" to my BIP when I know that it will cause reviewers to ignore it?

On Thu, Nov 20, 2025 at 3:18 AM Bitcoin Mechanic <bitcoinmechanic@ocean.xyz> wrote:
I think it makes sense to request that submissions should state if - and to what degree - AI has been used. It's reasonable to expect fewer eyeballs on AI generated submissions as they're so easily generated and their potential for wasting reviewer time is high.

If people are submitting AI generated code and lying about it than that obviously undermines what it is they're proposing so they're naturally disincentivized to do so, thus the honour system should be relatively effective.

I think most people have begun using it for making outlines and tweaking from there. The time saved is too significant for many to resist, and declaring that it was used for an initial outline shouldn't be too dissuasive for any reviewers.

The deeper discussion around legal implications and generally about AI code quality is not resolvable here, it's a massive topic with deep philosophical implications that go way outside the scope of BIP 3 imo.

Thanks

On Wednesday, November 19, 2025 at 2:40:55 PM UTC-8 Bitcoin Error Log wrote:
A few years ago, I had this idea that bitcoin divisibility needed to be fixed as a misconception. I put it (proto-bip177) in our bitcoin wallet app, promoted the idea where I could. It worked great, but only our users knew.

And then AI became good enough to use for some things. AI has been a HUGE unlock for me and my learning and creating style. Early this year, I told my AI, filled with context about the upcoming BIP3 standard, and examples of related BIPs, to make a BIP for me that properly expressed all of the nuances of my idea on how to handle removal of decimals in a UX.

It looked pretty good, but AI wasn't as good as it is today, and the formatting was total slop. Thankfully, most of the BIP reviewers are actually amazing people, and I was able to contact them directly and ask for help, because I'm not an actual developer (yet). After some private help, it was good enough for the mailing list, and a real draft. 

BIP 177 is a very simple BIP compared to most, and I'd probably make it better if I started today, but ... it exists! It might be the first/only (?) vibe-BIP, and, as of last week, due to Cashapp and Square support, it's possible that BIP 177 is now in more people's hands than not. 

Today, I now have several private drafts of BIPs I am working on with AI, I am trying to impose less slop on my peers as I work in private. These newer BIPs are increasingly technical, and I have also started vibe-coding implementations to test them, and I continue growing into an engineer. 

Now the BIP repo is my favorite part of Bitcoin and interacting with Bitcoin Core. I feel sincere gratitude to three BIP reviewers specifically for humoring my sincere, yet not matured, effort and desire to improve Bitcoin without changing consensus code.

My vision for the BIP repo and reviewers, and AI, is much different than yours. It is part of the story that brought me closer to Bitcoin development, and deep respect to my superiors for tolerating me while I was/am fledgling. 

Please don't add more weird subjective, exclusive barriers just because AI is warping reality. Deal with it, and please, please, continue making an effort to not only guard the BIP repo, but ensure it remains a fertile ground where Bitcoin Core maintains an attitude of being great stewards to the people, not only the specs. 

After all, we will need people to replace you some day, and those people need role models too.

~John Carvalho


On Wed, Nov 19, 2025 at 1:18 AM Greg Maxwell <gmax...@gmail.com> wrote:
No doubt *you* are able to make good documents with or without the aid of AI.

With outright AI 'authorship' you immediately run into potential copyright issues-- which I think is the origin of the "generated by" prohibition, otherwise I think disclosure would be sufficient.

Taking a step back: is Bitcoin's welfare maximized by permitting LLM glurge submissions in standards documents? In some cases it's benign, I readily agree, in others its harmful.  But the number of good submissions that could be made would hardly be increased by LLMs (being limited by expert proposers with good ideas) but the number of potential poor submissions is increased astronomically.  So I think it's pretty clearly a net harm to have text authored that way.

I've never had an impression that drafting was at all a limiting step in writing BIPs, though even to the extent that it has been at times it's possible to use LLMs in a review capacity to make authorship much easier ("What's missing / unclear?") without resorting to using it to author.

There is a particularly clear pattern at least with current LLM tools that users who lack the skills to have authored the work without an LLM are generally unable to recognize when the LLM is full of crap (and even sometimes when they should know better), so unfortunately they're only benign to use in the hands of those whose need is the least.  

And as a reviewer outside of Bitcoin I've found LLM powered proposers to be absolutely the worst to deal with. Because they're not submitting their own words and ideas, they're unable to change their thinking in response or explain sufficiently to change yours--- the interactions often degrade to them just copy and pasting their chatbot back to you.  Because it's cheap to generate more text they also tend to flood you out with documents several times longer than any human author would have bothered with.

I think LLMs have generally created something of an existential threat to most open collaborations: Now its so easy to get flooded out by subtly worthless material.  Many projects, including, Bitcoin have long struggled with review capacity being limited and a far amount of time waste by thoughtless (or even crazy!) submissions, but now it's automated and even the most well meaning person may now make submissions that are as bad as the most deviously constructed malicious submissions could have been in the past, not even know they are doing it, and can make a dozen proposals before lunch without even breaking a sweat.



On Wed, Nov 19, 2025 at 12:06 AM David A. Harding <da...@dtrt.org> wrote:
On 2025-11-04 15:10, Murch wrote:
> Summary of changes since BIP 3 was advanced to Proposed:
> [...]
>   - that BIPs submissions may not be generated by AI/LLM⁵
> [...]
> ⁵ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2006

I strongly disagree with this change.  If I were to begin working on a
new BIP today, I would use AI throughout the process.  I'd ask it to
help me create a todo list of what should go in the BIP; I'd ask it to
create a draft based on existing BIPs, my todo list, and whatever other
work products I had (e.g. prototypes); I'd then ask it to help me refine
the document until I was satisfied.

I would, of course, review every word of the draft BIP before submitting
it for consideration and ensure that it represented the highest quality
work I was able to produce---but the ultimate work would be a mix of AI
and human writing and editing.

I think considerate use of AI would be even more valuable for people who
are less comfortable with writing technical English-language documents
than I am.  For example, non-native literates, people with disabilities
that make text input difficulty, and those who recognize that they're
bad writers.

The PR forbidding AI doesn't go into any detail about its motivation,
although it references a previous discussion[1] where a low-quality BIP
PR was opened using mostly AI-generated content.  I'm guessing the
motivation is that AI (by itself) generates low-quality technical
content, BIPs should be high-quality technical content, and therefore we
should ban the use of AI.

However, as mentioned in the previous discussion, the BIP process
already requires high-quality content.[2]  AI-generated content can be
high-quality, especially if its creation and editing was guided by a
knowledgeable human.  Banning specific tools like AI seems redundant and
penalizes people who either need those tools or who can use them
effectively.

I advocate for reverting the first hunk of BIPs repository PR 2006.

-Dave

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/2005
[2] "After fleshing out the proposal further and ensuring that it is of
**high quality** and properly formatted, the authors should open a pull
request to the BIPs repository." --BIP3, emphasis added

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