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I don't want your PRs anymore

dpc.pw

71–80 of 148 posts

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#71
post #30

I've been on both ends of this. As the maintainer of ghidra-delinker-extension, whenever I get a non-trivial PR (like adding an object file format or ISA analyzer) I'm happy that it happens. It also means that I get to install a toolchain, maybe learn how to use it (MSVC...), figure out all of the nonsense and undocumented bullshit in it (COFF...), write byte-perfect roundtrip parser/serializer plus tests inside bina…

> push it to the master branch and close the PR than puppeteering someone halfway across the globe through GitHub comments into doing all of that for me

While I understand the sentiment I am glad I got into open source more than fifteen years ago, because it was maintainers “puppeteering” me that taught me a lot of the different processes involved in each project that would be hard to learn by myself later.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#72
post #28
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really, because you now have the cost of maintaining that fork, even if it's just for yourself.

Which is still true in our brave new llm world.

That may be part of the issue. Perhaps LLMs are just causing people to reveal how much they consider a maintainer as providing a service for them. Maintainers don't work for you, they let you benefit from the service they perform.

That workload of maintaining a fork doesn't come from nowhere, it's just a workload someone else would have to do before the fork occured.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#73

Maybe instead of submitting PRs, people should submit "prompt diffs" so that the maintainer can paste the prompt into their preferred coding agent, which is no doubt aware of their preferred styles and skills, and generate the desired commit themselves.

"Prompt diff" is just wish. Why not call it what it is? It’s perfectly fine to submit wishes, feature requests, RFCs or - if you want - "prompt diffs". But there’s no need for LLM to implement it, human can do it. Or not, LLM can. That’s not the point who implements it, it’s a wish.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#74

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.

bug reports should be reproducable. They may even be statistically reproduceable. A bug report that cannot be reproduced is worthless.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#76
post #41

It's good that he is upfront about it, but this surely shouldn't be taken as a general advice, since everybody has his own preferences. So this really shouldn't be a blogpost, but rather a "Contributing Guidelines" section in whatever projects he maintains.

I firmly believe the author's stance should be the default policy of just about every open source project. I don't even write my own code anymore, I sure as hell don't want to deal with your code. Give me ideas. Report bugs. Request features. I never wanted your code in the first place.

You believe. So it applies to projects you maintain. It doesn't mean it applies to project I maintain, or anybody else maintains. So this shouldn't be any more default than any other mode. And probably less default, since people generally developed other conceptions about "defaults" of etiquette in open source projects over the last 15 years.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#77

Maybe instead of submitting PRs, people should submit "prompt diffs" so that the maintainer can paste the prompt into their preferred coding agent, which is no doubt aware of their preferred styles and skills, and generate the desired commit themselves.

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

> Why would anyone bother doing this

For the same reason a PR can be useful even if it turns out to be imperfect. Because it reduces the workload for the maintainer to implement a given feature.

Obviously that means that if it looks likely to be a net negative the maintainer isn't going to want it.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 95% of this is covered by a warning that says "I won't merge any PR that a) does not pass linting (configured to my liking) and b) introduces extra deps" Maybe I'm not up to date with the bleeding edge of linters, but I've never seen one that adequately flags let out = [] for(let x of arr){ if(x > 3){ out.append(x + 5) } } Into let out = arr .filter(x => x > 3) .map(x => x + 3) There's all sorts of architectural de…

Indeed, yours has both more allocations and a bug (+3 instead of +5)

More allocations is a good point but you're being pedantic about the bug... how do you know the +5 isn't the bug? :P

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#79
Realistically, there are a much larger set of things that I don't mind forking these days. It is quite a bit of effort to get to a set of things that mostly don't have bugs, but in the past I might fork a few things[0] but these days, I vendor everything, and some things I just look at the feature list and have Claude rebuild it for me. So I totally understand why actual project maintainers and authors wouldn't want input. I, as a user, am not super eager to buy in to the actual maintainers' future work. It would be super surprising that they want to buy into strangers' work.

0: I liked BurntSushi's Rust projects since they are super easy to edit because they're well architected and fast by default. Easy to write in.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#80
Yes I feel very much like what I really want from people is very detailed bug reports or well thought through feature requests and even well specified test scenarios [not in code, but in English or even something more specified]

I know my code base(s) well. I also have agentic tools, and so do you. While people using their tokens is maybe nice from a $$ POV, it's really not necessary. Because I'll just have to review the whole thing (myself as well as by agent).

Weird world we live in now.

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