[docs] add tips from Graham Neubig on how to make good contributions (#…

…5012)

Co-authored-by: Graham Neubig <[email protected]>

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -92,3 +92,32 @@ You may also check out previous PRs in the [PR list](https://github.com/All-Hand
 
 If your changes are user-facing (e.g. a new feature in the UI, a change in behavior, or a bugfix)
 please include a short message that we can add to our changelog.
+
+## How to Make Effective Contributions
+
+### Opening Issues
+
+If you notice any bugs or have any feature requests please open them via the [issues page](https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands/issues). We will triage based on how critical the bug is or how potentially useful the improvement is, discuss, and implement the ones that the community has interest/effort for.
+
+Further, if you see an issue you like, please leave a "thumbs-up" or a comment, which will help us prioritize.
+
+### Making Pull Requests
+
+We're generally happy to consider all PRs, with the evaluation process varying based on the type of change:
+
+#### For Small Improvements
+
+Small improvements with few downsides are typically reviewed and approved quickly.
+One thing to check when making changes is to ensure that all continuous integration tests pass, which you can check before getting a review.
+
+#### For Core Agent Changes
+
+We need to be more careful with changes to the core agent, as it is imperative to maintain high quality. These PRs are evaluated based on three key metrics:
+
+1. **Accuracy**
+2. **Efficiency**
+3. **Code Complexity**
+
+If it improves accuracy, efficiency, or both with only a minimal change to code quality, that's great we're happy to merge it in!
+If there are bigger tradeoffs (e.g. helping efficiency a lot and hurting accuracy a little) we might want to put it behind a feature flag.
+Either way, please feel free to discuss on github issues or slack, and we will give guidance and preliminary feedback.