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I don't want your PRs anymore

dpc.pw

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61–70 of 148 posts

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#61

Post by akdev1l »

bawolff wrote: post #27

I think every maintainer should be able to say how they want or don't want others to contribute. But i feel like it was always true that patches from the internet at large were largely more trouble then they were worth most of the time. The reason people accept them is not for the sake of the patch itself but because that is how you get new contributors who eventually become useful.

I think the author of the article is missing this point.

When you actually work alongside people and everyone builds a similar mental model of the codebase then communication between humans is far more effective than LLMs.

For random contributions then this doesn’t apply

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#62

Post by Gigachad »

mvvl wrote: post #47

This is only going to get worse with LLMs. Now people can "contribute" garbage code at 10x the speed. We're entering the era of the "read only" maintainer focused on self-defense.

I’ve seen it already where someone has set some fully automated agent at the GitHub issues and machine gunned PRs every minute for every reported issue. Likely never looked at or tested by the submitter.

Even if they worked, it would be easier for the maintainer to just do that themselves rather than review and communicate with someone else to resolve issues.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#63

Post by vicchenai »

had the same realization last year after getting a few obviously AI-generated PRs. reviewing them took longer than just writing it myself. maybe the right unit of contribution is going back to being the detailed bug report / spec, not the patch

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#64

Post by mjmas »

travisjungroth wrote: post #31
acedTrex wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone bother doing this, prompts are not code, they are not shareable artifacts that give the same results.

Neither are bug reports or feature requests.

Do you accept bug reports that just say "it doesn't work" or do you require reproducibility?

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#65

Post by rebolek »

pncnmnp wrote: post #40

I have come to a similar realization recently - its what I call "Take it home OSS" - i.e. fork freely, modify it to your liking using AI coding agents, and stop waiting for upstream permissions. We seem to be gravitating towards a future where there is not much need to submit PRs or issues, except for critical bugs or security fixes. It's as if OSS is raw material, and your fork is your product.

This is very shortsighted and it’s like polishing gun to shoot your foot with it.

If it’s "take it home OSS" and "there is not much need to submit PRs or issues" then why would anybody submit PRs and issues for "for critical bugs or security fixes"? If they have fix and it works for them, they’re fine, afterall.

And while we’re at it, why would anybody share anything? It’s just too much hassle. People will either complain or don’t bother at all.

I think that after few years, when LLM coding would be an old boring thing everybody’s used to and people will learn few hard lessons because of not sharing, we’ll come to some new form of software collaboration because it’s more effective than thinking me and LLM are better than me and LLM and thousands or millions people and LLMs.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#66

Post by boricj »

pncnmnp wrote: post #40

I have come to a similar realization recently - its what I call "Take it home OSS" - i.e. fork freely, modify it to your liking using AI coding agents, and stop waiting for upstream permissions. We seem to be gravitating towards a future where there is not much need to submit PRs or issues, except for critical bugs or security fixes. It's as if OSS is raw material, and your fork is your product.

Recently I've been air-dropped into such a legacy project at work in order to save a cybersecurity-focused release date. Millions of lines of open-source code checked in a decade ago prior to the Subversion-to-Git migration, then patched everywhere to the point where diffs for the CVEs don't apply and we're not even sure what upstream versions best describe the forks.

By the end, the project manager begged me to turn off my flamethrower, as I was ripping it all out for a clean west manifest to tagged versions and stacks of patches. "Take it home OSS" is like take-out food: if you don't do your chores and leave it out for months or years on the kitchen counter, the next person to enter the apartment is going to puke.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#67

Post by alxhslm »

sfjailbird wrote: post #21

Given that submitters are just using LLMs to produce the PR anyway, it makes sense that the author can just run that prompt himself. Just share the 'prompt' (whether or not it is actually formatted as a prompt for an LLM), which is not too different than a feature request by any other name.

Agree with this. Maybe we should start making PRs with the proposed spec and then the maintainer can get their agent to implement it.

This is similar to what we’ve started to do at work. The first stage of reviewing a PR is getting agreement on the spec. Writing and reviewing the code is almost the trivial part.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#68

Post by mvvl »

vlapec wrote: post #55
mvvl wrote: post #47

This is only going to get worse with LLMs. Now people can "contribute" garbage code at 10x the speed. We're entering the era of the "read only" maintainer focused on self-defense.

...that assumes LLMs will contribute garbage code in the first place. Will they, though?

The problem isn't that it can't write good code. It's that the guy prompting it often doesn't know enough to tell the difference. Way too many vibe coders these days who can generate a PR in 5 seconds, but can’t explain a single line of it.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#69

Post by fc417fc802 »

dTal wrote: post #45
pncnmnp wrote: post #40

I have come to a similar realization recently - its what I call "Take it home OSS" - i.e. fork freely, modify it to your liking using AI coding agents, and stop waiting for upstream permissions. We seem to be gravitating towards a future where there is not much need to submit PRs or issues, except for critical bugs or security fixes. It's as if OSS is raw material, and your fork is your product.

Won't be much "raw material" left before long, if everyone takes that view.

Sure there will, as long as people continue to publish their work including the various forks. The community dynamic will change as will the workflows surrounding dependencies but the core principle will remain.

Vulnerability detection might prove to be an issue though. If we suddenly have a proliferation of large quantities of duplicate code in disparate projects detection and coordinated disclosure become much more difficult.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#70

Post by warmwaffles »

guelo wrote: post #44

It's interesting that this is the opposite of Steve Yegge's conclusion in his Vibe Maintainer article where he says he's merging 50(!) contributor PRs a day. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/vibe-maintainer-a2273a841040

I am curious to watch this unfold. How long until a clever supply chain attack effects this? What will the response be? Will be interesting to see it.
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