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Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

neilalexander.dev

11–20 of 162 posts

Re: Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

#11

> The changes were harmless and correct, but that did not make me feel better about accepting or merging them. So do you have the project’s best interest at heart or not? If you’re more concerned about the intent of a valid contribution than the content, why don’t you ask yourself where your intent is? You rejected a valid contribution based on unverified vibes about the person’s intent, instead of assuming they were…

The changes were grammar and spelling fixes in comments. It is not sufficient for someone to intend to be helpful.

Re: Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

#12

Hi Neil, fun to see you on HN. I agree with your points and I you summarized it very well as "Ultimately, open source is built on trust". AI is destroying trust in open source and many other areas and I think this will discourage teams from publishing their source code in the future. On the other hand, personal connections are becoming even more important, which is unfair to the younger generation and people who don'…

Today's conception of open source is different from the original anyway. It used to be "we made this thing, here's the code" but now it's turned into some kind of weird parasocial thing more akin to Facebook.

Re: Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

#13
post #2

I think the author meant 'burnish' there, which is a clever way of showing they didn't use AI :-)

Furnish makes more sense.

Both are fine, but I also prefer 'furnish', as in put in the main parts of your CV. In a way, 'burnish' is more like 'polish', suggesting an extra layer on top, rather than the fundamental parts.

Re: Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

#14

> The changes were harmless and correct, but that did not make me feel better about accepting or merging them. So do you have the project’s best interest at heart or not? If you’re more concerned about the intent of a valid contribution than the content, why don’t you ask yourself where your intent is? You rejected a valid contribution based on unverified vibes about the person’s intent, instead of assuming they were…

If people can spam low-effort PRs they will. Unverified vibes is you closing your eyes to a very real issue.

Re: Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

#16
post #12

Hi Neil, fun to see you on HN. I agree with your points and I you summarized it very well as "Ultimately, open source is built on trust". AI is destroying trust in open source and many other areas and I think this will discourage teams from publishing their source code in the future. On the other hand, personal connections are becoming even more important, which is unfair to the younger generation and people who don'…

Today's conception of open source is different from the original anyway. It used to be "we made this thing, here's the code" but now it's turned into some kind of weird parasocial thing more akin to Facebook.

[deleted]

Re: Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

#18
This makes sense. Apart from the original thing, I no longer upstream anything. It just takes comparatively more effort than maintaining a private fork with my own idiosyncratic fix. This must mean that even small fixes that non-contributors would make in the past are just happening off the books, so to speak. e.g. I upstreamed a tiny fix to Thrift codegen because some function could be much faster. These days I wouldn't bother. I'd just fork and leave upstream to be upstream.

I suspect many people are like me since it feels like a very normie position to take. That means that contributors are even more likely to be useful because both the drive-by genuine contributors have chosen otherwise and these contributors have increased.

It must be quite painful to be an open source maintainer right now. One wonders what to make of such projects in a future where a feature-list is a sufficient prompt.

Re: Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

I wonder if LLMs can tell when you're taking the mickey out of them. Has anybody tried imitating its mannerisms and had it react? There's a new benchmark for you: SelfAwareness!

Re: Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

#20
So the fixes are still fixes, but we (I am also a OSS maintainer) are unwilling to accept them as they boost the contributor’s status where we think the merit is very or extremely limited.

Why not have these PRs counted differently (by the platform), and/or colored differently in the timeline(s) thus made less visible or more clear?

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