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

kotaku.com

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

#31

Post by Aurornis »

HDBaseT wrote: post #3

I recently just started using Claude/ChatGPT/China models for some PS3 homebrew work. Every model seemingly falls flat in this scope of programming. The PS3 is very complex and the tooling is fairly undocumented in a lot of instances. It doesn't surprise me most of these AI PR's are nonsense. If anyone else has attempted writing PS3 homebrew apps using AI and has refined their tooling/systems/automation please let me…

I like to send Claude Code or Codex on max settings off to try a problem in parallel while I work on it.

In a complex codebase it’s funny how often they’ll come back with gigantic commits that just make everything worse or accomplish the goal but have 1000 lines of unnecessary complexity.

Every time they present it with a confident summary. I can see how a junior or just lazy dev would think this is their ticket to becoming a contributor to a repo with some big thing to put on their resume.

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

#33

Post by perching_aix »

Aww, PRs no longer open/welcome? Whatever will the usual suspects parrot now?

My personal schadenfreude aside, I wonder if this will follow a similar trajectory as security bug reports did recently. I'd be surprised, for a number of reasons, but the overall shape is looking awfully similar.

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

#34

Post by Marsymars »

I just took a look at the RPCS3 PR history, and it doesn't look that bad. (Certainly worse than "no slop", but not what I'd call a flood.)

I went 10 pages back on GitHub, and the overwhelming number of PRs look like good PRs that have been merged. There's really only a single handful of rejected slop-looking PRs. (And another handful from a single user who seemingly didn't know how to use Git/GitHub and was turning local non-compiling commits into PRs somehow.)

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

#35

Post by rgoulter »

nlh wrote: 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…

> What’s the future look like here?

For practically no effort, you were able to customise free software to your liking.

That's a surprising and really cool dynamic.

Is your "about an hour of ... using Codex 5.5" really something others can't do for themselves, that it's worth communicating the change?

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

#36

Post by hgoel »

nlh wrote: 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 did this recently too, didn't really care about the code quality of a small tool, just asked Claude to add in the features I wanted and it produced something that worked.

I just pushed the changes to my fork of the project and left it at that. Leaves the feature around for me and anyone that stumbles across my fork, without wasting the original dev's time looking at code I didn't care to look at.

Even before AI coding I think it was relatively common to fork some code and edit it to have something you want, then to either leave it as a personal version, or to never actually get a response on the PR.

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

#37

Post by djtango »

jcranmer wrote: post #29
nlh wrote: 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 respo…

AI has inverted the effort - in the past a PR meant someone had to come in, read your ticket, documentation, code and tests to successfully author a PR. Subsequently reviewing that PR would typically take less time than authoring it and you would receive fewer PRs.

Now it is it the opposite, maintainers are flooded with low effort PRs that take more effort to review than author, but the author is unable to see why this is problematic to the maintainer and the project.

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

#38

Post by lobf »

Groxx wrote: post #22
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Private torrent trackers apparently do this, and have done so for years.

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

#39

Post by perching_aix »

nlh wrote: 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…

Just go for it. Do it enough, and over time you'll either find yourself resilient enough, or conclude that people do not actually deserve it (or rather that you do not deserve the struggle), and you'll be cured of this compulsion. The only way to go is forward.

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

#40

Post by pabs3 »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #21
jamesu wrote: 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 unso…

I don't think that is true at all, I'm just a random FOSS dev with no connection to the Linux kernel community and I have gotten two small commits into the Linux kernel.
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