Contributing to LedFx

Thank you for your interest in contributing to LedFx. We welcome high-quality contributions that improve functionality, reliability, performance, documentation clarity, or long-term maintainability.

To keep the project healthy and sustainable, please read the following guidelines carefully before opening a pull request.

These guidelines should be seen as additional to those given in our Code of Conduct and How to Report an Issue.

Contribution Expectations

Context and Discovery

For bug fixes or behavioral changes, please include a brief explanation of:

  • How you discovered the issue

  • How the issue can be reproduced

  • Why the change is necessary or beneficial

This context helps maintainers review changes efficiently and avoids introducing unintended regressions.

Low-Effort and Trivial Pull Requests

To manage maintainer review overhead and keep development focused on meaningful improvements, LedFx reserves the right to batch merge low-effort or trivial pull requests.

Examples of changes that may be batched include (but are not limited to):

  • Typo-only or formatting-only changes

  • Minor comment or docstring edits

  • Very small, isolated fixes without broader context

  • Changes that do not materially affect behavior, performance, or usability

When pull requests are batch merged, commits may be squashed, reordered, or combined, and individual authorship attribution may not be preserved in the final commit history.

This policy exists to:

  • Reduce maintainer overhead, allowing limited time to be spent on substantive design, debugging, and architectural work.

  • Discourage reputation-farming behavior, where large numbers of trivial pull requests are submitted primarily to inflate public contribution metrics. This has become a real and growing issue across open-source projects, including LedFx, and imposes a measurable cost on maintainers. It’s the bleeding edge of AI based frameworks. The main implication being to build a profile of contribution counts into open source projects to support career aspirations, or worst case building trust with communities until permissions are gained to cause direct impact to security or integrity of code bases.

Substantive contributions will always be reviewed on their own merits and credited appropriately.

If you are human and just getting started with git contributions then just make it clear in the PR and / or discussion in discord, we are not gatekeeping getting started, but will keep the slop out.

We are not against AI generated code, but it must be wielded as a tool of empowerment, not a firehose of overheads.

Recommendations for Contributors

To maximize the chance that your contribution is reviewed promptly and merged as-is:

  • Open an issue first for non-trivial or non-obvious changes.

  • Discuss it in Discord #dev_chat

  • Bundle related fixes together rather than submitting multiple tiny PRs. This is a case of good judgement, find a balance.

  • Include tests where behavior changes or bug fixes are involved.

  • Avoid submitting whitespace-only or cosmetic changes unless they are part of a larger improvement.

  • Ensure your changes do not introduce hidden or bidirectional Unicode characters.

Additional Context

Maintainers across the open-source ecosystem have documented the increasing impact of low-effort and reputation-farming pull requests:

These issues are not unique to LedFx, but addressing them explicitly helps keep the project welcoming, sustainable, and focused on real value.

By submitting a pull request, you acknowledge and agree to these contribution guidelines. Thank you for helping make LedFx better.