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

neilalexander.dev

61–70 of 162 posts

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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just pull the pr into your local git, git amend --reset-author, and then push it to master yourself.

Merging commits/PRs without reading them is how you get a 2024 xz situation.

It still haunts me, that dot they slipped in, in one of the commits, every time I merge a PR

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

#62
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not let them have the status boost? This isn't zero sum.

> This isn't zero sum. True, it is actually negative sum, because fake merit erodes trust in real merit, as it makes it a lot harder to spot the latter.

I think Goodhart's law applies really well here. When people make commits for the sake of having made a commit to some famous repo, the "merit" that a commit measures is already useless. Remember Hacktoberfest 2020, before LLMs were popular? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894

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

#63

Ironically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the pro…

We do similar in Homebrew by autoclosing opens without the issue template (which implies using the API which often now implies AI).

The weird flip side is that the average good AI contribution is better than the average “I used no AI” contribution. Perhaps it’s because Homebrew has so many declarative guardrails and is so easy for agents to test.

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

#64
post #39
post #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 woul…

How could it take less effort to maintain a fork? You have to merge the upstream in every week and fight endlessly on conflicts with your patches.

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

#65
post #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 woul…

Discussing the issues, achieving consensus, making sure the fix fits the existing patterns and actually warrants the change, etc. These are and have always been a challenging part of contributing to open source. Typing code in your private fork that satisfies your “idiosyncratic fix” has always existed and been always the easier aspect of such changes. Chances are many of these changes would never be accepted into th…

Certainly, but there was motivation to do that in the past. My patch would probably line up with the rest of the code in the direction that they desired and the cost of fork maintenance would have pushed me to upstream in a way acceptable to maintainers.

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

#66

I’ve heard about similar issues with Hacktoberfest’s T-shirts back in 2020, but it was not as automated back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894

I was thinking the same. The amount of effort people went through just for a t-shirt. Now you can try to boost your career, far more valuable, and even with less effort. Of course it will happen, unfortunately.

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

#67

Ironically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the pro…

I think the idea of leveraging AI to find useless PRs is right.

I didn’t like the second part though where it starts banning people for “bad behavior”.

I get that AI resistance will be a thing in the next few years, but realistically engineers who plan on being around for the next 20-30 years just need to embrace it instead of being sour about it.

Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a whole. People who seek more elevated/finer products can still turn to handcrafted products.

Mass software will be produced by AI, and it will scale just fine.

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

#68

Ironically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the pro…

I think the idea of leveraging AI to find useless PRs is right. I didn’t like the second part though where it starts banning people for “bad behavior”. I get that AI resistance will be a thing in the next few years, but realistically engineers who plan on being around for the next 20-30 years just need to embrace it instead of being sour about it. Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a w…

I just think when you close PR's outright, you tend to get angry responses. And as a maintainer, you don't want to deal with angry responses. People who post bot PR's but can't accept having their PR's closed by a bot, shouldn't be visible to the maintainers.

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

#69
post #39
post #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 woul…

How could it take less effort to maintain a fork? You have to merge the upstream in every week and fight endlessly on conflicts with your patches.

Having seen this happening in the past, pre-AI, the answer is usually that they don't. They just stay on that version forever. Or it's maintained until the original author moves on, after which it's someone else's problem to figure out how to move back to the upstream, which has now had years of changes.

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

#70
I think opensource has decided to become big corporate cheerleader for a while and not actually done things strictly in the interest of users or developers, but providing the ideological justification as to why big companies can use their code and not give a dime back. I think aside from free software there could have been a movement where contributing to a free-software project would have allowed contributors to get payed and this would have to preclude companies simply using code as they can in say the MIT license and not give back.

Instead opensource is full of cynical projects and real important projects that do amazing work with maintainers who shoulder a great burden having to listen to people bitch about them for features and fixes while giving nothing and dealing with bad PR's (or even just having to evaluate good and mediocre PR's). Often the only pay is that you can go to HR and shit corp with your CV and say "Here is what I have done, can I now be treated like a bitch for more money".

I think opensource has allowed a lot businesses to treat developers with contempt and this is fully manifest with the way they conceive of AI agent's and Open source has probably become a vector for demoralization and devaluation more then anything.

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