Give Django your time and money, not your tokens • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by edelbitter » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

yuppiepuppie wrote: post #3

I love Django. Ive been using it professionally and on side projects extensively for the past 10 years. Plus I maintain(ed) a couple highly used packages for Django (django-import-export and django-dramatiq). Last year, I had some free time to try to contribute back to the framework. It was incredibly difficult. Difficult to find a ticket to work on, difficult to navigate the codebase, difficult to get feedback on a…

Its weird that still so many consider bug triage a problem to be circumnavigated, somehow in the way of "actual" contributions. Those are actual contributions! Even if they never make it into structured documentation or even python code. And especially so since that work can less usefully be augmented with newly available tool use.

A number of times now, I have found real value in someone just dropping into the bugtracker to restate the bug description in clearer terms or providing a shorter reproducer. Even if the flaw in Django had been fixed right away, I would not have pulled patches from master anyway. So the ticket comment was still a useful contribution to django, because I could use it in resolving the issue in how my software triggered it.

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

#102

Post by iamleppert » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

The solution to this problem is for LLMs to get better at producing code and descriptions that doesn't look LLM generated.

It's possible to prompt and get this as well, but obviously any of the big AI companies that want to increase engagement in their coding agent, and want to capture the open source market, should come up with a way to allow the LLM to produce unique of, but still correct code so that it doesn't look LLM-generated and can evade these kinds of checks.

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

#103

Post by genthree » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

acedTrex wrote: post #65

genthree wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Teach me your ways. I’ve long wished for an actual, human secretary to handle that for me. The context-switching and digging around in a painful, slow interface (I don’t just mean Jira, 100% of the ones project managers find acceptable seem to have this quality) is such a productivity killer, and it’s so easy to miss important things in all the noise.

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

#104

Post by paganel » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #78

lijok wrote: post #40

By what metric is “the level of quality is much, much higher” in the Django codebase? ‘cause other than the damn thing actually working, the primary metric of a codebase being high quality is how easy it is to contribute to. And evidently, it’s not.

Have you spent much time with the Django codebase? I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 days most of the assistance you got on the IRC channel was along the lines of "it's in this file here in the source, read it, understand it, and if you still have a question come back and ask again". I probably learned more about writing idiomatic Python from that than anything else.

> I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9

I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then, and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since then), all as the result of me going through the source-code. Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but it made one getting to know the underlying code so much more.

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

#105

Post by jpitz » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #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 pa…

A decade or more of people copy-pasting rote solutions from StackOverflow only supports the notion that many people will forego comprehension to foster the illusion of competent productivity.

This ain't an AI problem, it's a people problem that's getting amplified by AI.

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

#106

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

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

This is so important. Most humans like communicating with other humans. For many (note, I didn't say all) open source collaborators, this is part of the reward of collaborating on open source.

Making them communicate with a bot pretending to be a human instead removes the reward and makes it feel terrible, like the worst job nobody would want. If you spent any time at all actually trying to help the contributor underestand and develop their skills, you just feel like an idiot. It lowers the patience of everyone in the entire endeavor, ruining it for everyone.

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

#107

Post by xpe » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #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 pa…

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

Don’t blame the people, blame the system.

Identifying the problem is just the first step. Building consensus and finding pragmatic solutions is hard. In my opinion, a lot of technical people struggle with the second sentence. So much of the ethos in our community is “I see a problem, and I can fix it on my own by building [X].” I think people are starting to realize this doesn’t scale. (Applying the scaling metaphor to people problems might itself be a blindspot.)

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

#108

Post by seanp2k2 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

zenolove wrote: post #76

MattGaiser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Are people generally unhappy with the outcomes of this? As anecdotally, it does seem to pass review later on. Code is getting through this way.

It's slippery. You're swamped with low-effort PRs, can't possibly test and review all of them. You will become a visible bottleneck, and guess whether it's easier to defend quality vs. "blocking a lot of features" which "seem to work". If you're tied by your salary as a reviewer, you will have to let go, and at the same time you'll suffer the consequences of the "lack of oversight" when things go south.

The Board has decided that we can no longer afford artisanal, hand-crafted software, and that machine-made will suffice for nearly all use cases.

Enshittification Enterprise Edition.

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

#109

Post by seanp2k2 » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #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 pa…

Obviously the solution is better AI PR reviewers with more context for FOSS projects /s

And I’m 100% sure there are dozens of startups working on that exact problem right this second.

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

#110

Post by watty » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #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 pa…

I see the problem everyday and am just playing devil's advocate but it doesn't really do a good job explaining the "why".

They hint at Django being a different level of quality compared to other software, wanting to cultivate community, and go slowly.

It doesn't explain why LLM usage reduces quality or they can't have a strong community with LLM contributions.

The problem is that good developers using LLM is not a problem. They review the code, they implement best practices, they understand the problems and solutions. The problem is bad developers contributing - just as it always has been. The problem is that LLMs enable bad developers to contribute more - thus an influx of crap contributions.