Terrell Russell, Ph.D.

Executive Director

iRODS Consortium

June 29 - July 2, 2026

iRODS User Group Meeting 2026

Barcelona, Spain

An Abbreviated AI History…

• 1950 Turing Test

• 1966 Eliza

• 1972 Prolog

• 1988 Reinforcement Learning

• 1996 IBM Deep Blue beats Kasparov

• 2011 IBM Watson wins Jeopardy!

• 2012 Deep Learning - Neural Networks

• 2020 GPT-3

• 2022 ChatGPT

• 2023 Agents introduced - Gemini, Claude, Llama, Mistral

• 2024 Agents can summarize and do specific tasks

• 2025 MCP

• Late 2025 Coding Agents got really good

The Robots are Here

We DO NOT need to clarify, decide, or declare our feelings about agentic coding, in general.  It will continue to advance and change.

We DO need to consider if the iRODS Consortium should put a formal AI policy in place.

Without an AI Policy in Place

Today, the iRODS Consortium claims:

• ownership
• understanding
• responsibility
• maintenance

Today, the iRODS Consortium publishes:

• server
• server libraries
• server plugins
• client libraries
• clients

Are there other pieces or scenarios we should be thinking about?

A Useful Discussion

https://brianmeeker.me/2026/05/14/have-a-coherent-ai-policy/

• No AI mandate
• You must understand what your AI generated code does
• You must be able to do your job if your AI tooling disappears
• Care about your teammates and our customers

A Policy Question

Should the iRODS Consortium take a stance on AI-authored

or AI-assisted code submissions?

• Yes - Should allow it, and require annotation / attribution / disclosure
• Yes - Should allow it, and allow annotation / attribution / disclosure
• Yes - Should allow it, and forbid annotation / attribution / disclosure
• Yes - Should forbid it

• No  - Should take no position

https://strawpoll.com/PKgleXaE4Zp

Thank you