Proposal to change expenses policy: AI subscriptions

Project management
1

Hi everyone,

Software development is changing fundamentally right now. As AI coding assistants are getting better and better, developer productivity increases drastically. Everyone is using those assistants, so not using them on AntennaPod would mean that the competition has an unfair advantage. While active open source developers can apply to GitHub for free copilot access, this might not fit into all use-cases. Most other assistants cost money.

Our donation expenses policy does not cover this type of expense. Also, it doesn’t cover hardware costs for test devices (I spent about 250€ on Chromecast and wearos devices that I bought primarily for AntennaPod development. I don’t want to get reimbursed for those, but want to start the discussion on those as well).

I would like to propose the following new type of expenses that can be refunded:

Developer Tools
Active developers with a proven track record are eligible to apply for reimbursement of tools that they need for AntennaPod development. This includes AI subscriptions or (in rare cases) even test hardware.

Developers are eligible for applying for AI subscriptions if they contributed at least 6 substantial merged pull requests and have been consistenly active in the project for at least 3 months. Developers are eligible for applying for hardware reimbursement if they contributed at least 30 substantial merged pull requests and have been consistently active in the project for at least 2 years.

For now, I would not automate this decision and simply make a spending proposal on the forum for everyone interested. If this gets too much, we can always automate it later.

Of course, the fact that development gets AI assisted doesn’t mean the entire app will turn into a vibe-coded mess of unstable spaghetti code. Nothing changes about the code reviews and exhaustive testing that we already have. It does, however, highlight a problem we already had before AI: Writing code is relatively quick. Reviewing and maintaining it is what actually takes the time. So we will continue to have needs decision calls where we decide what features we want to accept and which ones we do not see fit into AntennaPod. And we continue to lack developers who want to work on reviewing other developer’s code.

3

Let’s consider this approved if nobody disagrees until April 25, 2026 (1 week from now).

4

I don’t disagree. Could I also ask that if you are allowing AI coding tools that in the repository you start creating AGENT.md and / or CLAUDE.md files that specify some of the rules you want the coding tools to follow? Of course that means you might have to start testing tools like Claude Code.

If you use Claude Code, you might consider adding a few .claude/hooks as well such as mandatory unit test running or a ratchet to make sure the unit test coverage doesn’t go down?

5

It’s hard to tell how much we should reimburse for AI tools. For example if I bought the $20/ month plan for Claude, how much of that will AntennaPod reimburse?

For every merged PR, AP will reimburse $20 or the usage of AI for the period of PR open to closed?

I’m just giving an example. Would be nice to make this simpler? 1 PR == 1 month of basic AI coding tool since it’s really hard to tell how many tokens were used for the PR

6

We already have an AGENTS.md file :slight_smile: Of course we are not really looking for people 100% vibe-coding PRs that they don’t even understand themselves. We had that in the past, and code reviews were a pain.

My idea was to reimburse the full plan if you are an active AntennaPod developer. So you ask on the forum BEFORE you buy something and the community decides. Before the next month starts, you ask again and we check whether you contributed in the last month.

If this becomes too much noise, we can later change the process. I think it should be okay though, because there are not too many active developers.

7

Yes, I like that idea to keep on asking

8

Nobody opposed, it is considered approved. I updated the policy page.