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Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

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Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#61

Great message but I wonder if the people who do everything via LLM would even care to read such a message. And at what point is it hard/impossible to judge whether something is entirely LLM or not? I sometimes struggle a lot with this being OSS maintainer myself

"the people who do everything via LLM". That's a bit of a straw man characterization. I don't believe that there are many professional developers "do everything with an LLM'. I don't even know what that statement means.

There may not be many, but these people do exist.

I watched someone ask Claude to replace all occurrences of a string instead of using a deterministic operation like “Find and Replace” available in the very same VSCode window they prompted Claude from.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#62
post #18

Perhaps we should start making LLM- open source projects (clearly marked as such). Created by LLMs, open for LLM contributions, with some clearly defined protocols I'd be interesting where it would go. I imagine it could start as a project with a simple instruction file to include in your project to try to find abstractions which can be useful to others as a library and look for specific kind of libraries. Some peopl…

Please do, that would be amazing.

You'd have to manage the contributions, or get your AI bots to manage them or something, but it would be great to have honeypots like this to attract all the low effort LLM slop.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#63
post #45

I feel like open source is taking the wrong stance here. There’s a lot of gatekeeping, first. And second, this approach is like trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella. AI is here to stay. We can’t stop it, for much we try. I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it. For example, automating code reviews with AI.

If you can TELL someone used AI, its always, without fail, a bad use of AI.

I disagree with that. I can easily tell when my non-native English speaking coworkers use AI to help with their communications. Nine times out of ten, their communication has been improved through the use of AI.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find a single place in TFA (which doesn't represent or claim to represent open source writ large) that's encouraging people to not use AI.

Literally the first line of the article: "Spending your tokens to support Django by having an LLM work on tickets is not helpful. You and the community are better off donating that money to the Django Software Foundation instead."

That's not telling people to not use LLMs. It's telling them that using them in a specific way is not helpful.

Reading beyond the first line makes it clear that the problem is a lack of comprehension, not LLM use itself. Quoting:

> This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#65

s/Django/the codebase/g , and the point stands against any repo for which there is code review by humans: > 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.…

AI autocomplete and suggestions built-in to Jira are making our ticket tracker so goddamn spammy that I’m 100% sure that “feature” has done more harm than good. I don’t think anybody’s tracking the actual net-effects of any of this crap on productivity, just the “vibes” they get in the moment, using it. “I got my part of this particular thing done so fast!” I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of…

Ironically my favorite use of claude is removing caring about jira from my workflow. I already didn't care about it but now i dont have to spend any time on it.

I treat jira like product owners treat the code. Which is infinitely humorous to me.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#66
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find a single place in TFA (which doesn't represent or claim to represent open source writ large) that's encouraging people to not use AI.

> So how should you use an LLM to contribute? > Use an LLM to develop your comprehension. Then communicate the best you can in your own words, then use an LLM to tweak that language. If you’re struggling to convey your ideas with someone, use an LLM more aggressively and mention that you used it. This makes it easier for others to see where your understanding is and where there are disconnects. > There needs to be un…

It's eminently actionable -- the Django maintainers can decide their sensitivity/tolerance for false positives and operate from there. That's what every other open source project is doing.

(Again, I must emphasize that this is not telling people to not use LLMs, any more than telling people to wear a seatbelt would somehow be telling them to not drive a car.)

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#67

It's like every new innovation at this point is exacerbating the problem of us choosing short term rewards over long time horizon rewards. The incentive structure simply doesn't support people who want to view things from the bird's eye view. Once you see game theory, you really can't unsee it.

This is what happens when governments around the world spend decades inflating the currency to pay for their bloated projects, devaluing peoples savings and paycheques and causing them to prioritise making money over anything else. You kinda gotta do it to survive.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#68

Great message but I wonder if the people who do everything via LLM would even care to read such a message. And at what point is it hard/impossible to judge whether something is entirely LLM or not? I sometimes struggle a lot with this being OSS maintainer myself

"the people who do everything via LLM". That's a bit of a straw man characterization. I don't believe that there are many professional developers "do everything with an LLM'. I don't even know what that statement means.

On a widely used open source project I maintain I've been seeing PRs in the last month that are a little off (look okayish but are trivial or trying to solve problems in weird ways), and then when I look at their account they started opening PRs within the last few weeks, and have opened hundreds of PRs spread over hundreds of repositories.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#69
This is getting really out of control at the moment and I'm not exactly sure what the best way to fix it is, but this is a very good post in terms of expressing the why this is not acceptable and why the burden if shifting on the wrong people.

Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not.

One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now part of the hiring process. So people will continue to try to game the system by using LLMs to automate that whole process.

"I have contributed to X, Y, and Z projects" - when they actually have little to no understanding of those projects or exactly how their PR works. It was (somehow) accepted and that's that.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#70
I disagree with these takes

It is not pride to have your name associated with an open source project, it is pride that the code works and the change is efficient. The reviewer should be on top of that.

and I hope an army of OpenClaw agents calls out the discrimination, so gatekeepers recognize that they have to coexist with this species

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