Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

Some projects ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 ) are setting a norm to disclose AI usage. Another project simply decided to pause contributions from external parties ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 ). Instead of accepting driveby pull requests, contributors have to show a proof of work by working with one of the other collaborators.

Another project has started to decline to let users directly open issues ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 ).

There's definitely an aspect here where the commons or good will effort of collaborators is being infringed upon by external parties who are unintentionally attacking their time and attention with low quality submissions that are now cheaper than ever to generate. It may be necessary to move to a more private community model of collaboration ( https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3ph... ).

edit: Also I applaud the debian project for their recent decision to defer and think harder about the nature of this problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324087

> If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.

> Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it.

> In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes the transparency and vulnerability of being a human.

> For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human.

> This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.

I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I am seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond to feedback on their behalf.

There is little doubt that if we as an industry fail to establish and defend a healthy culture for this sort of thing, it's going to lead to a whole lot of rot and demoralization.

Do what the Django team does, and be of service to the public!

I challange you to prove that Django is sloppier than your LLM-Version