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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

#72
> and little to no follow-up engagement from their authors.

A strategy I sometimes use for external contributions is to immediately ask a question about the pull request. Ignoring PRs where I don't get a reply or the reply doesn't make sense potentially eliminates a lot of low quality contributions.

I wonder if a "no AI" rule is an overly blunt instrument. I can sympathise with it but babies and bathwater etc.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#73

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.

Using a coding agent over days on a personal project. It has made me think 1. These llms are smart and dumb at the same time. They make a phenomenal contribution in such a short time and also do a really dumb change that no one asked for. They break working code in irrational ways. I’ve been asking them to add so many tests for all the functions I care about. This acts as a first guard rail when they trip over themse…

Questions. I want to get into coding agents, so, out of curiosity: which one(s) did you use and how much money has it costed you? (Any metric is fine)

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conveniently left off the follow up. > @zeroxBigBoss: .. It's not all AI, I have experience with Zig and MacOS, .. > @mitchellh: I appreciate it! And my bad on the experience, I must have misunderstood or misremembered your messages Use xcancel. For the very least to see an entire thread.

Every time.

Getting tiresome, isn't it?

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#75

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).

Yeah I have always seen PRs from new contributors as having (on average) negative value but being an investment into a hopefully future positive contributor. I don't have that optimism for contributors that start out with AI slop.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, that's the problem, and my suggestion is to change it from a web to a tree instead, to solve that issue.

That does not work because you won't have multiple parties vouching for a new entrant. That's the whole reason a web was chosen instead of a tree in the first place. Trees are super fragile in comparison, bad actors would have a much bigger chance of going undetected in a tree like arrangement.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life I don't think it's coming to an end. It's getting more difficult, yes, but not impossible. Currently I'm working on a game, and since I'm not an artist, I pay artists to create the art. The person I'm working closest with I have basically no idea who they are, except their name, e…

How do you know it's a person on the other end? Would you even see a difference if you had a computer generate that art? These are very important questions that cut to the heart of "what is art".

> How do you know it's a person on the other end? Would you even see a difference if you had a computer generate that art?

Unless AI companies already developed and launched plugins/extensions for people to do something that looks like hand drawn sketches inside of Clip Studio, and suddenly got a lot better at understanding prompts (including having inspiration of their own), then I'm pretty sure it's a human.

I don't think I'd get to see in-progress sketches and it wouldn't be as good at understanding what I wanted to have had changes then. I've used various generative AI image generators (latest one Qwen Image 2511 and a whole bunch of others) and none of them, including with "prompt enhancements" can take very vague descriptions of "I want it to feel like X" or "I'm not sure about Y but something like Z" and turn it into something that looks acceptable. At least not yet.

And because I've spent a lot of time with various generative image making processes and models, I'm fairly confident I'd recognize if that was what was happening.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#78

> 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…

Also turns out the mildly higher barrier to entry for mailing-based workflows is actually a feature.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#79
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Outside contributors have never been valuable as pure code monkeys.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#80

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.

> global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life I don't think it's coming to an end. It's getting more difficult, yes, but not impossible. Currently I'm working on a game, and since I'm not an artist, I pay artists to create the art. The person I'm working closest with I have basically no idea who they are, except their name, e…

I think it absolutely is coming to an end in lots of ways.

Movie/show reviews, product reviews, app/browser extension reviews, programming libraries, etc all get gamed. An entire industry of booting reviews has sprung up from PR companies brigading positive reviews for their clients.

The better AI gets at slop and controlling bots to create slop which is indistinguishable from human content, the less people will trust content on those platforms.

Your trust relationship with your artist almost certainly was based on something other than just contact info. Usually you review a portfolio, a professional profile, and you start with a small project to limit your downside risk. This tentative relationship and phased stages where trust is increased is how human trust relationships have always worked.

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