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  <h1>Questions people actually ask</h1>
  <p class="lead prose">
    Including the ones that feel too basic to say out loud. They are not.
  </p>

  <h2>Before you start</h2>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-good-enough">
    <summary>Am I good enough to contribute to open source?</summary>
    <p>Yes, and the question is more common than you would think. Every issue in
    this project labelled <code>good first issue</code> was written for somebody
    who has never contributed before. Some of them are one line of HTML.</p>
  </details>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-break-something">
    <summary>What if I break something?</summary>
    <p>You cannot. You work on a copy (a fork), on a branch, and a maintainer
    reads your change before it goes anywhere near the real project. There is no
    button you can press that damages anything.</p>
  </details>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-no-git">
    <summary>I have never used Git. Is that a problem?</summary>
    <p>No. The <a href="git-basics.html">Git basics</a> page walks through every
    command you need, and there are only about six of them. You do not need to
    understand Git to make your first contribution — you need to follow six
    steps and then understand them afterwards.</p>
  </details>

  <h2>Claiming and working on an issue</h2>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-claim">
    <summary>How do I claim an issue?</summary>
    <p>Comment <code>/claim</code> on it. A bot assigns it to you within a few
    seconds and labels it <code>status: claimed</code> so nobody else picks it
    up.</p>
  </details>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-how-many">
    <summary>How many issues can I hold at once?</summary>
    <p>Two. It is not a punishment — it is so that one person cannot claim
    fifteen issues and leave them sitting while everybody else has nothing to
    work on.</p>
  </details>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-changed-mind">
    <summary>I claimed something and cannot finish it. What now?</summary>
    <p>Comment <code>/unclaim</code> and it goes back in the pool. That is
    genuinely fine and nobody thinks less of you. If you go quiet for five days
    a bot releases it automatically.</p>
  </details>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-stuck">
    <summary>I am stuck. Who do I ask?</summary>
    <p>Comment on your own issue saying what you have tried and where it stopped
    working. That is not an admission of failure — a well-described problem is
    itself a contribution, and it is how maintainers find out the instructions
    were unclear.</p>
  </details>

  <h2>Pull requests</h2>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-closes">
    <summary>Why does my pull request need "Closes #12" in it?</summary>
    <p>That line links your work to the issue and closes the issue automatically
    when you are merged. Without it somebody has to close it by hand, which is
    how issues get forgotten and two people end up doing the same work.</p>
  </details>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-changes-requested">
    <summary>A reviewer requested changes. Did I do badly?</summary>
    <p>No. This is the normal path for most pull requests, including ones from
    people who have been writing code for twenty years. Push another commit to
    the same branch and the pull request updates itself.</p>
  </details>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-ci-red">
    <summary>The checks went red. What does that mean?</summary>
    <p>An automatic check found something. Click <strong>Details</strong> to see
    which one and why — every check in this project prints the exact command to
    run on your own machine to reproduce it. A red check is information, not a
    verdict.</p>
  </details>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-how-long">
    <summary>How long until somebody looks at my pull request?</summary>
    <p>Within 48 hours. If it has been longer, say so in a comment on the pull
    request — you are not being annoying, we dropped the ball.</p>
  </details>

  <h2>Using AI</h2>

  <details class="faq-item" id="q-ai">
    <summary>Can I use ChatGPT or Copilot?</summary>
    <p>Yes. What you cannot do is open a pull request you are unable to explain.
    You are responsible for understanding the change, running it yourself, and
    answering questions about it in review — which is the whole point of doing
    this in the first place.</p>
  </details>

  <hr>

  <h2>Your question is not here</h2>
  <p class="prose">
    Then it belongs here. Open an issue with the question and we will add it —
    that is a real contribution, and the questions people are afraid to ask are
    exactly the ones worth writing down.
  </p>
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