XY problem, don't expand the design doc before you have the idea for the design. Don't compile down into lower abstraction levels until necessary

i think it makes perfect sense and I'll probably adopt the same posture for my open source project.

The idea is that the core dev team is the one with the AI harness. If someone contributes an idea they can just feed it to their AI to implement it and it probably costs 10 minutes of human time, because they trust that their harness will be able to implement the feature competently.

So, because the implementation effort is so low, the only aspect that matters if the quality of the idea. It's way easier to screen human written text than a bunch of code in a PR. If you just give them code, they would not know if you made it with a competent harness. If you gave them a AI written design they would have a lot more to read through to decide whether it's slop. If you just give them an idea it's a lot easier to determine whether it's high quality.

Coding agents are extremely useful but often extremely dumb with design. If you do not design the software yourself, you will probably get slop. This was always the core issue with vibe coding.

They specifically ask not to create/submit a formal proposal. I do not see any restriction on the use of AI otherwise.

Yet the README is generated ("Two skills maintain the boundary in both directions.") and the demo is .. a Mobius strip?

I'd prefer if you explain what it is you are building in the form of human-written text.

That's not surprising. I have much the same thing in my latest open-source work[0]. I have a workflow that's working nicely with agents, it's more of a pain to review someone else's code than it is to get a well-written description of their problem.

0: https://github.com/pjlsergeant/byre?tab=contributing-ov-file