I assume the policy was written by rational, reasonable people, with a practical goal in mind: to prevent "AI slop", that is, dubious-quality, high-volume contributions by people who don't exactly understand how their PR works, and how the project works, but "computer says yes" because tests (which they also do not understand well) seem to pass.

If a submission (PR, bug report) is high-quality, and the person behind it is responsive and clueful, so that the useful parts of the submission can be taken, and problematic parts, fixed, then it does not matter what process has produced the code. It could as well be a Boltzmann brain [1].

Given that the author of the contribution actually got a grip on the problem, and on the solution, the limitation of "no AI use" is no longer load-bearing. Not only might it have been counterproductive — it's also unverifiable in practice. It becomes absurd, akin to a demand that the text must have been edited by Vim and not VSCode. It must be noted that a misguided policy may indeed force the contributor to delve in the depths of the process of PR creation, and showcase every manually undertaken step in an attempt to prove that no AI was involved. Ironically, it is no secret that many less scrupulous participants might leverage AI to imitate just that. It must be noted though that the decision ultimately belongs to the project maintainers.

(The above paragraph was hand-crafted for your and my entertainment.)

In short: by default I respect the authors of the policy and hence assume that they enact the policy for reasons that are rational, not religious.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

Without a policy, I refuse to have a clear understanding!

That's not my read, at least not if you give them enough credit to use their software.

My read is any LLM use should be opaque to them. You should be able to explain your bug find in your own words, have formatted as the project expects, not have any LLM generated comments (which trend towards being useless anyways)

The wording of the post is very clever, if you're green you read it and you say "I'm banned because I use Claude". If you're experienced enough you can read the message between the lines: "if you use LLMs, it should still have gone through your brain before it reaches mine, so I'm not turned into a meat puppet by proxy"

My point is that it seems extremely strange to do that when they have developers who use LLMs already contribute to the project. I feel like they'll either alienate people who are interested, or just not care to enforce their no-LLM policy.