# Opening Proprietary Code to Contributors Checklist

DevFeed: [Opening Proprietary Code to Contributors Checklist](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/opening-proprietary-code-to-contributors-checklist-20528.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://code.dblock.org/2026/04/08/opening-proprietary-code-to-contributors-checklist.html>)

Author: Daniel Doubrovkine (dblock@dblock.org)

Published: 2026-04-08T00:00:00Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Daniel Doubrovkine](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/daniel-doubrovkine.md>)

Topics: [ai-coding](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-coding.md>), [pull-requests](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pull-requests.md>), [Open Source](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/open-source.md>), [ci](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ci.md>), [GitHub](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/github.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-coding](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-coding.md>), [ci](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ci.md>), [contributions](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/contributions.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [github](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/github.md>), [how-to](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/how-to.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [pull-request](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pull-request.md>), [tests](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tests.md>)

## AI overview

The article presents a checklist for making proprietary software repositories easier and safer for newcomers and customer contributors to use. It recommends a discoverable CONTRIBUTING.md, a simple getting-started path, automated tests in CI, locally runnable minimum versions, documented deployment processes, and a GitHub fork-and-pull-request workflow. It frames AI coding tools as lowering barriers to meaningful contributions.

## Source excerpt

Before AI coding assistants, a typical engineering team built expertise with the years: new team members joined, contributed small bug fixes, then were given more ambitious tasks over time as they became more comfortable in a codebase, to ultimately become experts. This process took years. In contrast, today, almost every engineer, and many non-engineers, have access to tools that can gather context from any codebase, and produce a large volume of high-quality code in a day. This lowers the bar for contributing meaningful changes to the software we build and enables many more individuals without domain or codebase expertise with good ideas to see them to light. At work, I asked my team to actively seek contributions from our customers with an active engagement for our proprietary code. Inspired by the open-source model, we are reviewing our systems from the angle of a newcomer easily contributing to them. Here's a checklist to apply to any repo. Create a single landing CONTRIBUTING.md that welcomes contributors and encourages them to contribute while insisting on higher standards, such as needing to write automated tests with every contribution. Make your source code repo discoverable. Your source code README, and your product or tool should have a visible link to your single CONTRIBUTING.md. Include a simple to follow "Getting Started" checklist in CONTRIBUTING.md that enables any developer at the company to make a trivial change in the application and submit a pull request. Ensure that your project has an automated test suite that runs in CI, is trivial to run locally, has few to no dependencies, and has enough coverage to give confidence to any new contributor that they did not break key functionality. Evolve every project to a state where a minimum viable version of it can run locally without the need to ask for permissions, certificates, or keys, install or get access to unnecessary dependencies, removing those barriers from the new contributor path. Describe h