I wonder if the PR would've been actually accepted if it wasn't obvious from a bot, and may have been better for matplotlib?
Honestly, they recognized the gravity of this first bot collision with their policy and they handled it well.
Someone, who is a person, has decided to run an unsolicited experiment on other people's repos.
OR
Someone just pretends to do that for attention.
In either case a ban is justied.
And given that, I think "must not use LLM assistance" will age significantly worse than an actually useful description of desirable and undesirable behavior (which might very reasonably include things like "must not make your bot's slop our core contributor's problem").
I think some things are just obviously wrong and don't need to be written down. I also think having common rules for bots and people is not a good idea, because, point one, bots are not people and we shouldn't pretend they are
Imagine if you built a bot that would crawl github, run a linter and create PRs on random repos for the changes proposed by a linter - you'd be banned pretty soon on most of them and maybe on Github itself. That's the same thing in my opinion.
> The bot (allegedly) did a better performance improvement than the maintainer.
But on a different issue. That comparison seems odd