NCEAS wrote down the AI arguments its own teams kept having: agent access, and sessions that forget

Rachel King's list of the arguments that kept resurfacing contains one item a reviewer can settle line by line and two that a reviewer cannot: how much access to give an AI agent, and what to do when a long chat session forgets a decision it made an hour earlier ^[6].

Access is different in kind from a bad suggestion. It is granted once, it persists, and it applies to work nobody has read yet. Context loss has a similar shape: a session that has dropped an earlier decision keeps emitting code consistent with the wrong one until somebody notices, and the wrongness is internally coherent. Neither failure is repaired by better prompting after the fact, which is the most plausible reason the ten rules place project preparation and AI selection in the "before coding" phase, and put verification of generated code plus documentation of the process in the "after" phase ^[9].

The documentation half is the part that carries weight, because it is the only artefact that outlives the tool. A record of which assistant produced which function, and who checked it, converts an unreproducible chat into something a methods section can hold. Without it, a team's evidence that a human verified anything is somebody's recollection.

The paper is also blunt about who is in the room. King cites a roughly thirteenfold gap between generative AI use in some high-income countries and use in many low-income ones ^[10], and reports that male researchers describe larger productivity gains than their female counterparts ^[15]. Guidance written for people with an agent wired into their repository is, at that ratio, guidance for a minority of the field it addresses.

Cat Fong says the result filled a gap nobody else had addressed ^[3], and several of the 22 contributors went in openly skeptical of the tools, which is why the output reads as a tradeoff inventory rather than an endorsement ^[12]. That skepticism is doing useful work. A rulebook produced by enthusiasts tends to specify which tool to use; one produced by an argument tends to specify who decides.

For a center where dozens of teams sit side by side on wildfire, biodiversity and climate work ^[13], the operational change is narrow and checkable: agent access now has a slot in the project plan, before the pipeline exists, where a name can sit next to the decision. The rest of the guide is advice. That slot is a control.