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

neilalexander.dev

71–80 of 162 posts

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

#71
IMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone.

Actually, if I see someone doing open source like it's a performative career checkbox, that will not be positive signal, and could easily be negative. I understand that people will do what they need to do to get a job, but that pragmatic career checkboxing itself isn't positive. I will have to look for positive signal elsewhere for that person.

The problem is that our industry has gotten very bad at hiring, and now we have everyone playing all sorts of games with it -- rehearsing Leetcode interviews, bad faith open source contributions, feigning enthusiasm, spamming AI-tweaked resumes, outright cheating on interviews -- rather than focusing on doing good work, and being part of a team.

If you're involved in hiring, and you care about effectiveness and culture, consider pushing back against the prevailing dysfunctional big-corporate-cattle-herding practices. Especially if your company has no excuse to be big-corporate dysfunctional, and can't afford to be.

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

#72

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.

Not just that how the maintainer was treated by the attacker which tells you something about the way people feel entitled to maintainers time and efforts for nothing even by people not looking to exploit the project. And the abuse after he received despite it being an easy mistake that the culture encourages people to make.

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

#73
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.

I explained GitHub to a friend as "like DeviantArt, but for code".

And it is true, but that just means the bar for expectations has been raised thanks to early open source success. Tarball drops don't cut it anymore (unless you're Alphabet, Inc.) and you actually have to foster a community around what you release in order to attract bug reports and contributions. And you need a code of conduct, and a code of conduct enforcement committee, and a steering committee or board of directors, and...

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

#75
post #48
post #41

I also maintain a popular open source repo and have seen similar. If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!) with no associated issue I also have no qualms closing. I do generally leave a short note about why I closed (volume of these is around 5/week) showing how far off they (Claude) was and encourage ope…

> If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!) Claude doesn't read AGENTS.md automatically, it only looks for CLAUDE.md.

[dead]

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

#76
post #48
post #41

I also maintain a popular open source repo and have seen similar. If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!) with no associated issue I also have no qualms closing. I do generally leave a short note about why I closed (volume of these is around 5/week) showing how far off they (Claude) was and encourage ope…

> If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!) Claude doesn't read AGENTS.md automatically, it only looks for CLAUDE.md.

I only look for humans.md and humans.txt.

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

#77
post #73
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I explained GitHub to a friend as "like DeviantArt, but for code". And it is true, but that just means the bar for expectations has been raised thanks to early open source success. Tarball drops don't cut it anymore (unless you're Alphabet, Inc.) and you actually have to foster a community around what you release in order to attract bug reports and contributions. And you need a code of conduct, and a code of conduct…

You don't need any of that, usually.

You just scratch your own itch and you're done. There is no need to "attract contribution", usually, as usually, your project will do exactly what you need.

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

#78

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

I think you failed to notice the ban would be a reaction to recurrent bad behavior, such as ignoring maintainer requests.

What's your solution to handle accounts which spam projects with nonsense PRs?

> get that AI resistance will be a thing in the next few years (...)

This is a very lazy opinion to express. If you pay attention to the post you're replying to, you will notice that the problem isn't AI. The problem is spamming projects with PRs that are meaningless while completely ignoring maintainers.

You'd have the same problem if some guy decided to spam the project with a constant barrage of small low-effort nonfunctional PRs.

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

#79

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…

Which part of the second part do you dislike more?

That AI will be given the power to ban people?

Or that AI will be the ones getting banned?

If it's the former, expect an invite from the AI resistance. :)

If it's the latter, well, that can be fixed by spending more tokens and writing better PRs so that the AI moderator doesn't think they're "low-effort, AI-like". I've seen my share of low-effort PRs from humans, too. Low-effort is low-effort, whether it's from humans or AI.

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

#80
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not just that how the maintainer was treated by the attacker which tells you something about the way people feel entitled to maintainers time and efforts for nothing even by people not looking to exploit the project. And the abuse after he received despite it being an easy mistake that the culture encourages people to make.

> And the abuse after he received despite it being an easy mistake that the culture encourages people to make.

I believe that that was in part simply people defending their reality.

Because if it's not the maintainers fault, then why did it fail? What are the implications of that? What does it mean for me personally? Do I have to do something differently? Do I have to change my assumptions?

People do not like these feelings. They want to simply push them away. The easiest way of doing so is blaming that guy and being done with the negative emotion.

Most people do suck at this whole "being human" business.

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