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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

#51

Post by stavros »

steveruizok wrote: post #39
junon wrote: 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?

Hey, Steve from tldraw here. We use AI tools to develop tldraw. The tools are not the problem, they're just changing the fundamentals (e.g. a well-formed PR is no longer a sign of thoughtful engagement, a large PR shows more effort than a small PR, etc) and accelerating other latent issues in contribution. About the README etc: we ship an SDK and a lot of people use our source code as docs or a prototyping environmen…

This is my experience as well. I work with AI agents a lot, they are very useful. What's not useful is some passer-by telling the AI "implement " and then sending that as a PR. I could have written a sentence to the LLM too if I wanted to, you aren't really giving me or the project any value by doing that.

Now that writing the code is the easy part, we're just going to transition to having very few contributors, who are needed for their architectural skills, product vision, reasoned thinking, etc, rather than pure code-writing.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#52

Post by embedding-shape »

jacquesm wrote: post #48
theshrike79 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to manifest Web of Trust coming back to help people navigate towards content that's created by humans. A system where I can mark other people as trusted and see who they trust, so when I navigate to a web page or in this case, a Github pull request, my WoT would tell me if this is a trusted person according to my network.

You need a very complex weighing and revocation mechanism because once one bad player is in your web of trust they can become a node along which both other bad players and good players alike can join.

Build a tree, cut the tree at the first link, now you get rid of all of them. Will have some collateral damage though, but maybe safe to assume actually "good players" can rejoin at another maybe more stable leaf

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#53

Post by stavros »

steveruizok wrote: post #40
exactlie wrote: post #10

> claude added the Task issue type 4 hours ago is this satire?

I have a GitHub action that labels and tags issues automatically. It also standardizes the issue title. I love this script and would recommend it to anyone. https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/blob/ce745d1ecc1236633d2bf6...

This is excellent, thank you.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#54

Post by timeon »

foretop_yardarm wrote: post #36
sbondaryev wrote: post #2

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.

I actually think Ada has good potential as an AI adjacent language because the syntax is optimised for readability (I personally find it very readable too.)

I think problem is not with quality but quantity in reasonable time frame.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#55

Post by freehorse »

pella wrote: post #19
kanzure wrote: post #9

That's interesting; another project stopped letting users directly open issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319

Check Ghostty "CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-assistance-notice" "The Ghostty project allows AI-assisted code contributions, which must be properly disclosed in the pull request." https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/CONTRIBUTIN... Mitchell Hashimoto (2025-12-30): "Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs tha…

Apart from the external person turning out having experience with zig and macos (but not on developing terminals and rendering stuff), this is a good imo example of what ai can be used well for: writing one-off code/tools for which it is enough that it is just working (even if not perfectly), but one does not really care about maintaining, because it is meant to be used only on a specific occasion/context. In this case, the external person was smart enough to use AI to identify the problems and not to produce "fixes" to send as a PR.

Imo, an issue is that the majority of people who submit AI slop as PRs have different motivations than this person (developing a PR portfolio whatever that may mean), or are much less competent and eager to do actual work themselves (which AI use can worsen).

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#56

Post by jacquesm »

embedding-shape wrote: post #52
jacquesm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a very complex weighing and revocation mechanism because once one bad player is in your web of trust they can become a node along which both other bad players and good players alike can join.

Build a tree, cut the tree at the first link, now you get rid of all of them. Will have some collateral damage though, but maybe safe to assume actually "good players" can rejoin at another maybe more stable leaf

It's a web, not a tree... so this is really not that simple.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#57

Post by littlecranky67 »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #12

> An open pull request represents a commitment from maintainers: that the contribution will be reviewed carefully and considered seriously for inclusion. This has always been the problem with github culture. On the Linux and GCC mailing lists, a posted patch does not represent any kind of commitment whatsoever from the maintainers. That's how it should be. The fact that github puts the number of open PR requests at t…

I have an old open-source project that I archived on GitHub (because I do not maintain it anymore). Once a user opened an issue with a completely unrelated project of mine (same user account than the archived one), posting some AI slop with step-by-step click instructions how to unarchive the project and enable issues etc. He spammed the same text to two different email addresses he found from my Github page and the git history. I banned that user immediately from opening issues on that said project, closed the issue and ignored him. Just to receive another outrageous email why I did not comply with his request, and how I would dare to ban him from opening further issues. I swear, the entitlement sometimes on GitHub is unbearable.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#58

Post by freehorse »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #13
sbondaryev wrote: post #2

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.

Understanding (not necessarily reading) always was the real work. AI makes people less productive because it's speeding up the thing that wasn't hard (generating code), while generating additional burden on the thing that was hard (understanding the code).

As not all codebases are well-written, I have found useful once to get an LLM to produce code that does X, essentially distilling from a codebase that does XYZ. I found that reviewing the code the LLM producced, after feeding the original codebase in the context, was easier than going through the (not very well-written) codebase myself. Of course this was just the starting point, there was a ton of things the LLM "misunderstood", and then there was a ton of manual work, but it is an (admittedly rarer) example for me where "AI-generated" code is easier to read than code written by (those) humans, and it was actually useful having that at that point.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#59

Post by IsTom »

theshrike79 wrote: post #47
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #45

We've enjoyed a certain period (at least a couple of decades) of global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life, from open-source to journalism and job interviews.

I've been trying to manifest Web of Trust coming back to help people navigate towards content that's created by humans. A system where I can mark other people as trusted and see who they trust, so when I navigate to a web page or in this case, a Github pull request, my WoT would tell me if this is a trusted person according to my network.

Unfortunately trust isn't transitive.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#60

Post by agumonkey »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #45

We've enjoyed a certain period (at least a couple of decades) of global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life, from open-source to journalism and job interviews.

trust in trust.. as programmer would say

the web brought instant infinite 'data', we used to have limits, limits that would kinda ensure the reality of what is communicated.. we should go back to that it's efficient

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