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PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

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21–30 of 162 posts

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#21
post #8

We've seen a few takes on this kind of issue, but the solution I liked the best was the linux "developers take full responsibility" approach. The "Assisted-by:" tag was a pretty nice touch too. The article unfortunately feels more like a rant than a good exploration of the problem space.

> the solution I liked the best was the linux "developers take full responsibility" approach.

The people who can realistically submit a Linux patch that will ever get looked at is already a super select group through who-you-know network effects.

You can't apply the same system to random open source projects, the best option for people that run random small to medium sized open source projects is just to ban all unsolicited PRs, otherwise you're going to spend way too much effort sorting through the slop.

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#22
post #5

It’s starting to feel like we may need to go back to the model where you need to be invited to be able to submit code or PRs. The barrier is just too low now for popular projects.

I think some sort of reputation score would make more sense, assuming it’s possible to design one that can’t be easily faked

Perhaps something where you can build a graph of who invited whom so you could prune entire sections that act maliciously. One might even consider it a to be a web of connections which are built on (or torn down by the loss of) trust.

Sounds futuristic. Maybe it's an NFT on an agentic blockchain for deep-sea solar farm mining?

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#23
post #6

I'm curious what percentage of PRs are just the AI blindly writing code and submitting a PR without testing, and which have at least been locally tested to some degree. Any OS maintainers have any insights on this?

Thats the thing, what if the codebases had CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md files, which clearly dictated that A) tests need to pass B) anything you write needs tests C) the code quality must adhere to these standards etc.etc.... Helping the LLMs that people Vibe code with, produce better quality results. By not having these in place, it means people who want to help out, cant. because htey dont understand whats going on. addin…

It really shouldn't be the RPCS3 devs' problem to fix other people's broken AI pipelines.

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#24
post #6

I'm curious what percentage of PRs are just the AI blindly writing code and submitting a PR without testing, and which have at least been locally tested to some degree. Any OS maintainers have any insights on this?

Thats the thing, what if the codebases had CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md files, which clearly dictated that A) tests need to pass B) anything you write needs tests C) the code quality must adhere to these standards etc.etc.... Helping the LLMs that people Vibe code with, produce better quality results. By not having these in place, it means people who want to help out, cant. because htey dont understand whats going on. addin…

> Should the barrier of entry be someone who knows how to code? or should the barrier of entry be someone who is motivated to help with open-source software.

Probably yes? QED submitting slop PRs is not helping. If "helping" is sticking it through an LLM, the developers can do that themselves with better insight and guidance? If you must help via an LLM, donate cash for tokens.

If you can't code, and cant donate cash/machine time, help by confirming issue reproductions, design, wikis, documentation, whatever.

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#25
This is like when everyone started opening code of conduct addition PRs against every opensource repos except now a lot of these AI ones take actual effort to know it's in bad faith.

Or maybe it's worse because a lot of them aren't in bad faith they are well meaning people who just don't know or understand enough to realize they aren't being helpful.

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#26
post #10

I’ve read so many stories like this that I’ve actually gotten scared of making PRs open source projects. There’s one in particular where a feature I really wanted didn’t exist, so I forked and had Codex 5.5 assist with building the feature on my local version. It works perfectly. My life has been improved in being able to have this feature now. Normally I’d want to share it back with the community so others can benef…

The same as it does now.

I'm glad it works for you, but please do not submit low-effort stuff like this, if you're not willing to do the rest of the work to make it maintainable.

I get the desire to help -- that's fine -- but AI code is abundant and of low value. Don't sandbag them with more work and increase their maintenance burden, with stuff they could easily vibe code themselves.

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#27

The emulation space is particularly bad about this because there are a lot of semi-technical and "well meaning" users who will do anything to get their games to play better and AI gives them a way to make it seem like they are doing something useful, without being able to judge the quality of the output they are producing. One of the projects I work on recently had a guy drop by and explain that he wanted to use Clau…

Over the last month, I've been using Claude to assist in some things that were at the edge of my ability (or maybe just a hair's breadth beyond it). I've added features to open source projects that everyone's been waiting years for. I always fork it telling myself that I want to be able to submit PRs, but really I'm just making the changes for myself, since I don't even have the nerve to show it off.

If these people can make changes to the emulators that will actually make the games more playable for them, the changes don't have to go back into the official project. It works for them and makes things better.

Right now, I've been working on some changes to the mkv container spec to have embedded scripting cable of doing Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in interactive mode. VLC and mpv. I've already added mutable torrent support to Transmission, and it works. But yeh, if someone took a look at it who really knew the code, they'd see it was AI slop and do a hard pass.

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#28
post #10

I’ve read so many stories like this that I’ve actually gotten scared of making PRs open source projects. There’s one in particular where a feature I really wanted didn’t exist, so I forked and had Codex 5.5 assist with building the feature on my local version. It works perfectly. My life has been improved in being able to have this feature now. Normally I’d want to share it back with the community so others can benef…

> I feel guilty that I’m getting a better version of this software and others aren’t

Why? None of what you did is special. What stops anyone else from asking their AI to implement the same feature you did, if they need it?

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#29
post #10

I’ve read so many stories like this that I’ve actually gotten scared of making PRs open source projects. There’s one in particular where a feature I really wanted didn’t exist, so I forked and had Codex 5.5 assist with building the feature on my local version. It works perfectly. My life has been improved in being able to have this feature now. Normally I’d want to share it back with the community so others can benef…

As a maintainer, discovering that a PR is AI-generated just absolutely saps any motivation I have to actually review it. I've never been a great reviewer, and AI means I have to watch out for really different kinds of errors. There's also the potential for extra friction with interactions with the "author": some people try to pull a "I'm just a smol bean, not a programmer, how dare you ask me to do anything" in response to changes, while others just play a middleman role in between you and the AI they're using.

If you're actually motivated to get a working fix upstream, and you're willing to do more than be a passive player, then it's not necessarily a problem to submit it (subject to responsible disclosure, of course)... but you also say that you don't have the time to properly engineer it, which makes me think you don't have the time to be sufficiently engaged in the upstreaming process anyways.

Re: PS3 Emulator Devs Politely Ask That People Stop Flooding It with AI PRs

#30
post #6

I'm curious what percentage of PRs are just the AI blindly writing code and submitting a PR without testing, and which have at least been locally tested to some degree. Any OS maintainers have any insights on this?

Thats the thing, what if the codebases had CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md files, which clearly dictated that A) tests need to pass B) anything you write needs tests C) the code quality must adhere to these standards etc.etc.... Helping the LLMs that people Vibe code with, produce better quality results. By not having these in place, it means people who want to help out, cant. because htey dont understand whats going on. addin…

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