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Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

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Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#3

Seems like reading the code is now the real work. AI writes PRs instantly but reviewing them still takes time. Everything flipped. Expect more projects to follow - maintainers can just use ai themselves without needing external contributions.

This is probably true, and while I expect productivity to go up, I also expect "FOSS maintainer burnout" to skyrocket in the coming years.

Everyone knows reading code is one-hundredth as fun as writing it, and while we have to accept some amount of reading as the "eating your vegetables" part of the job, FOSS project maintainers are often in a precarious enough position as it is re: job satisfaction. I think having to dramatically increase the proportion of reading to writing, while knowing full well that a bunch of what they are reading was created by some bozo with a CC subscription and little understanding of what they were doing, will lead to a bunch of them walking away.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#5
post #4

They invited AI in by creating a comprehensive list of instructions for AI agents - in the README, in a context.md, and even as yarn scripts. What did they expect?

Wouldn't that be for their usage? It's presence doesn't implicitly mean they want incomplete PRs submitted to their repository constantly.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#6

Seems like reading the code is now the real work. AI writes PRs instantly but reviewing them still takes time. Everything flipped. Expect more projects to follow - maintainers can just use ai themselves without needing external contributions.

[flagged]

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#7
post #4

They invited AI in by creating a comprehensive list of instructions for AI agents - in the README, in a context.md, and even as yarn scripts. What did they expect?

The CONTEXT.md file was created 5 months ago, and the contribution policy changed today. I would interpret that as a good-faith attempt to work with AI agents, which with some experience, didn't work as well as they hoped.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#8

Seems like reading the code is now the real work. AI writes PRs instantly but reviewing them still takes time. Everything flipped. Expect more projects to follow - maintainers can just use ai themselves without needing external contributions.

In the civic tech hacknight community I'm part of, it's hard to collaborate the same now, at least when people are using AI. Mostly because now code often feels so disposable and fast. It's like the pace layers have changed

It's been proposed that we start collaborating in specs, and just keep regenerating the code like it's CI, to get back to the feeling of collaboration without holding back on the energy and speed of agent coding

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