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

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

#41

Post by toast0 »

djtango wrote: post #37
jcranmer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Exvuse me, I've been doing drive by manual slop PRs for at least a decade.

I certainly didn't read a ticket; I ran into the problem myself. I probably didn't read documentation or write tests either. I just fixed my problem and tried to help others a bit.

Tldr, pr review has always been hard.

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

#42

Post by _JoRo »

greenknight wrote: post #19
_JoRo wrote: 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…

I agree, and yet I think even with a well engineering agent harness, there are a lot of unknown unknowns out there.

I imagine the problem will persist if users continue to submit PRs that pass the harness without being able to validate for themselves that it actually works.

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

#43

Post by jonhohle »

MBCook wrote: 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.

It’s not just popular projects. On a small utility I have I received a PR that was more lines than the project had. I’m happy to be a good maintainer, but reviewing something that’s effectively an AI rewrite isn’t something I care to review and since I can’t vet it, can’t blindly accept it.

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

#44

Post by pabs3 »

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…

It isn't clear that AI generated code is copyrightable, so that portion of the code wouldn't able to have the license enforced against violators, and so the authors wouldn't accept such code. Of course if its permissively licensed, the authors probably don't care to enforce the license, so might be fine including the code.

To submit the code, at minimum, you should review and fix the code diff, run the appropriate static analysis tools against it, write the pull request description and commit messages yourself, read the contribution guidelines, make sure everything matches that, disclose that you used AI and for what, and the prompts used.

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

#45

Post by techpression »

greenknight wrote: post #19
_JoRo wrote: 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…

What motivation? Is it motivation to start Claude Code and let it run when you have no idea what’s going on? Is motivation the same as token spend? Yes, the barrier should definitely be someone who knows how to code when submitting, well, code.

And since the training data seems to be very lacking, no amount of markdown would fix that.

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

#46

Post by perching_aix »

lobf wrote: post #38
Groxx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're sarcastically describing web-of-trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

Why are they doing that (i.e. being sarcastic)? Who knows.

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

#47

Post by [deleted] »

koolba wrote: post #20
_JoRo wrote: 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?

> … and submitting a PR without testing, and which have at least been locally tested to some degree. There’s no need to test the PR when you already asked the AI to not make any mistakes.

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by sockbot »

The problem is really behavioural, not the tooling. People that do not understand, test and document their decision making in their PRs should not be submitting them, regardless of what tooling (AI or otherwise) they used to create them.

This problem existed before AI, but it is now just worse due to the spamming nature of these "contributors". It's another form of endless September where people unfamiliar with the norms of team software development are overwhelming existing project maintainers faster than maintainers can teach them the norms of behaviour.

In the end, some sort of gatekeeping mechanism is needed to avoid overwhelming maintainers, whether it's a reputation system, membership in an in-group, or something else.

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

#49

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

what is the appeal of blindly blasting open source projects with high-volume PRs? If you're trying to help the project to accomplish something, it doesn't follow that a firehose approach is tenable, if only for the fact that reviewing the code takes time.

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

#50

Post by Auracle »

bakugo wrote: post #28
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 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?

Because it still took them an hour in addition to testing it, so presumably it’s not ridiculously simple and people have a limited amount of time?
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