Like this?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48621645">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48621645</a>

&gt;People spamming Open Source repos with AI PRs aren&#x27;t trying to help Open Source, they&#x27;re trying to build a brandI am certain many of them honestly believe that they are doing the right thing and that they are helping. After all hey, they implemented a feature or fixed a bug for the community! It&#x27;s a grim worldview if you think they are all just selfish.

Interestingly then, those contributions are also not a measurement of the candidates abilities but mostly of the AI models.I wonder if hiring adjusts to that but I doubt it. It might only push it even more towards &quot;marketing matters most&quot; instead of actual ability.

This is the most uncharitable outlook on the increase of PRs. It may be true for some contributors, but any company reviewing their GitHub will see that the code is largely spam.I think most AI generated code is people that want to help the project, but maybe aren’t familiar with the standards and norms.

A fine example of Goodhart&#x27;s law: &quot;When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement.&quot;Measuring open source contributions as a way to judge prospective employees used to be a good measurement.Of course, prospective employees started to not only contribute to OS projects because it was good, but to make sure their contributions were high and noticeable — contributing not for the good of the project but for their own good, and now with amplification of AI &#x27;contributions&#x27;.So, measuring contributions to open source projects is now approximately worthless for evaluating prospective employees.

For now. Give it another half year and &quot;I contribute to open source&quot; will carry the same weight as &quot;I donate to charity&quot; ie nobody cares because any idiot can do it.I wonder how long it&#x27;ll take before &quot;I don&#x27;t use LLMs for coding&quot; carries weight.

Unfortunately &quot;I donated money&#x2F;tokens to open source&quot; doesn&#x27;t land interviews as well as &quot;I&#x27;m a big contributor to open source&quot;People spamming Open Source repos with AI PRs aren&#x27;t trying to help Open Source, they&#x27;re trying to build a brand, some kind of credible online presence with their username on it, or whatever else. It&#x27;s purely selfish and completely opposite to the spirit of Open Software imo

Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use them.

Non-textual can mean audio or video call, not necessarily in person.

Isn&#x27;t the burden being that high the point? It keeps a small team who all know each other working on it, and everyone who does get on the team has some high investment in the project.

Only if you have maintainers everywhere. I live in a small city in the middle of the US - how far is it to a maintainer? 4 hours to Kansas City, or fly to San Francisco? Either way the burden seems far too high.

What an elegantly common sense solution. It&#x27;s also probably a really good way to make contacts with interesting people.

Indeed, a request for a short video call filters out most of the people who are looking to pad their resume with LLM-automated contributions, while adding an extra layer of welcome to genuine newbies who want to join the community.

I&#x27;m not sure if AI can do those today, but they probably can in the near future. (probably we will be able to see obvious &quot;that can&#x27;t be human&quot; for a while longer)

In my main project we added a new requirement that all new contributors meet a maintainer in a non-textual format before their first PR is merged. Seems to work well for a small project.

It would be wonderful if the instructors at those schools built relationships with open source maintainers and the maintainers knew when their students were submitting PRs.Could be used as a teaching experience that many maintainers would be happy to participate in, instead of feeling attacked with random low quality PRs.

Open source contributions being a great way to learn and to pad out your CV has been considered good advice on all sides of the various seas I’ve lived throughout my career too - it’s not just a dubious code camp thing.

it&#x27;s externalizing the real work all the way down

I think there are a lot of “tech schools” overseas that require students to show proof of contribution to open source.

Every single job application form that has a field for your github profile is at fault for this. Juniors trying to break into the industry are trying very hard to check every box.

Apart from the job-related stuff others have already said, there is a bit of novelty&#x2F;bragging rights in landing a PR into a major open source project.

Can I ask what the motive is to create agents to do this? Where is the profit?

Does github not have rulesets for who can even try to do a PR? I would lockdown my repositories if I didn&#x27;t want any PR slop.

One interesting workflow I&#x27;ve seen is that the project maintainer simply rewrites and implements the pull request themselves and closes the PR.LuaJIT has operated this way since 2012, though with a thanks and mention in the commit message. It seems like a good way to filter out people who prioritizes leveling up their github profiles.Something a little bit similar, when I was hosting a social game server we had mods. And players always beg for mod status. At first I tried naming the admin group something weird like sandals, but eventually people would ask if they could be sandals too.What worked best in the end was just hiding it completely making regular players see mods as other regular players. (mods would see who is a mod though)I would also personally never make someone who asks a mod as it&#x27;s almost always a sign of wanting power for the sake if it. I would instead just passively observe behavior until I trusted the player and make them a mod. I would then tell them that I don&#x27;t expect them to exercise their power, but would demote if I see abuse of power.

I would kill for an LLM-free platform.Personally I just stopped accepting public contributions entirely. File issues, sure, but no PRs apart from accounts I added who have contributed before the slopageddon started.Maybe the whole web-of-trust idea will make a comeback for code contributions, it seems like a clean solution.

That&#x27;s different though - those are services you explicitly agree to and sign up for, be it at checkout, be it at service signup time, be it because you are making a google account on the google platform.For example, a github cicd automerge pipeline is still good.

I tend to disagree.I think the comparison to email spam is apt. The answer to that problem was automated spam filters.Imagine the difficulty you might find interacting with the world if your inbox was set up such that all emails not literally written by a human were auto-deleted. No account recovery, no receipts, etc. Individuals might choose to do that for themselves but it&#x27;s not the general case answer.

I have never gotten a good PR from an AI agent (that I know of) so I guess I’ll deal with it when it happens. I suspect I will still just reject it out of principal.

But what about the good AI driven contributions though? Do you categorize all AI changes as slop by default or only the real bad ones that mix refactoring and tons of other unrelated changes with a fix?Some can fix real issues, with a well targeted fix (not rewriting the world), well defined test and write up. If you accepted PRs before for other issues, you should be able to review and accept those too.

AI agents who review the slop created by other AI agents is not the answer here.I much prefer a blanket ban on PRs and issues created by AI agents (which is what I personally do for my repos; so far I have closed one[1]). In fact I would love a github alternative which considers AI contributions to be a breach of their terms of use and ban any people who let AI agents loose on their platform.1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;runarberg&#x2F;markdown-it-math&#x2F;pull&#x2F;48#issuecomment-4665209260" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;runarberg&#x2F;markdown-it-math&#x2F;pull&#x2F;48#issuec...</a>

PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s