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Pull request limits are cutting down the noise

github.blog

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Pull request limits are cutting down the noise

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add a mechanism to donate tokens towards the maintainers' LLMs for a particular ticket and this whole class of problems will be resolved all at once.

> Add a mechanism to donate tokens Or donate money. Crazy idea, eh?

Some people have tokens but no money. Tokens, like Amazon gift cards and Tide detergent [1], are a form of currency in a way. If people have a currency equivalent they want to spend for your benefit, or the collective benefit, it makes sense (depending on level of effort) to enable them to do so.

[1] How Tide Detergent Became a Drug Currency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023204 - January 2013 (124 comments)

(edit: maybe put AI tokens on stablecoin rails as value tokens? could be fun, could move them around instantly between participants on the value rails and could consume them programmatically, if someone implements this idea, buy me a beer!)

Re: Pull request limits are cutting down the noise

#23

I think this is a really solid move. This gives OSS contributors a lot of flexibility. You could set the limit to 0, and manually add contributors. You could set it to 1-3 to allow people to get their foot in the door. But the de facto limit today is infinite, which is spammed. Imagine if GMail did this! If I don't whitelist or reply within `n` emails, youre done. I would KILL for that.

HEY email service does something like that:

https://www.hey.com/features/the-screener/

Re: Pull request limits are cutting down the noise

#24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add a mechanism to donate tokens towards the maintainers' LLMs for a particular ticket and this whole class of problems will be resolved all at once.

That's the same as donating money, which you can already do.

Well, yes, exactly. And yet nobody but the biggest corp-sponsored projects get anything more than negligible donations. So what does this tell us? These "contributors" are happy to throw money at open source projects as long as they think they're doing something by prompting the LLM?

Re: Pull request limits are cutting down the noise

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add a mechanism to donate tokens towards the maintainers' LLMs for a particular ticket and this whole class of problems will be resolved all at once.

And creates a new class of problems. Why not just fork the project and modify it yourself at that point, and cut out the maintainer middleman.

Why fork at all? Why not just vendor the dependency and slop the changes you want on top of it? You can even pull from upstream down the line for the latest updates.

The problem is sloppers really, really want other people to use their code, so they feel useful for doing a bit of prompting, probably to rationalize how much they pay Anthropic et al to do the actual work for them. I just wish they'd direct that money directly to the projects they find useful instead of trying to insert themselves as middlemen.

Re: Pull request limits are cutting down the noise

#27
The primary spam problem isn't that a single account opens many pull requests on a single repo, but that spammer accounts open many pull requests spread across many repositories. So limiting accounts to a couple of open PRs on my repository won't help much.

I'd rather enforce a limit based on the number of PRs that account opened across all public repositories it doesn't have write access to within the last week. And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow (perhaps via a "close as unwelcome" option for the maintainer).

Re: Pull request limits are cutting down the noise

#28
I don't often give GitHub credit, because I work with it every day and I encounter something frustrating or broken nearly every day ending in "day", but kudos to them for working on addressing the some of the big problems.

I also like the other features mentioned in the blog post. It won't make a difference to me and my daily work, but I'm glad that they are taking the criticisms seriously.

Though I have to admit that I'm a bit conflicted about this. Part of me also wants more people to move off of GitHub to help break their monopoly on code on the web, but I also don't want the people making and maintaining open source to give up their projects due to burnout and slop spam.

Re: Pull request limits are cutting down the noise

#30
If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?

This is a band-aid. Maybe even a good band-aid, because it'll keep individual contributors from flooring the zone. But the core problem is Github's model that assumes code is worth reading.

I'm much rather see the agent logs stapled to PRs. Make it easy to understand if there's a brain behind the suggested changes before engaging.

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