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

neilalexander.dev

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

#101

Post by krisgenre »

While exploring an open-source project recently, I noticed a bug in the initial setup. I asked Claude to verify it, and the AI confirmed the issue. When Claude asked if I wanted to file a bug report, I agreed, assuming it would simply generate a formatted text block for me to copy and paste. However, I soon realized it had actually submitted the issue directly to GitHub. It turned out I had the GitHub CLI installed and was logged in with my work account.

Out of curiosity, I then asked Claude to draft an enhancement request for a new feature. It created a highly detailed issue and went on to generate the corresponding code for the enhancement.

I haven't submitted a pull request because the code is written in a language I don't know. Part of me considered submitting it anyway since it works and could be useful, but after reading this post, I think I'll just keep it under wraps.

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

#102

Post by brabel »

DarmokTanagra wrote: post #91
oblio wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale matters. If people do it, it's maybe 10 PRs like that per month. With AI there could be hundreds per day.

Then that AI is fixing hundreds of typos a day, seems like win.

Exactly. Why are people looking for problems here?? There isn’t any. There wasn’t 100s of PRs so why are you so worried about that?? Stop assuming there will be unless you stop even the useful ones.

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

#103

Post by streetfighter64 »

brabel wrote: post #93
streetfighter64 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What merit was there to have anyway. Would the author accept the same changes from a human?? I am inclined to believe they would, I certainly would. Would you have attributed merit to someone just fixing typos? I mean it’s quite helpful. But I wouldn’t think a commit fixing typos ever attributed merit to a developer. So it’s hard to understand the problem with AI doing this. If it was a bot like dependabot but for fi…

Well, as I mentioned there was already in 2020 the problem of (human-generated) slop commits causing unnecessary work for maintainers.

The commit in itself might add some minuscule value to the project, but when you take into account the time it takes to check the commit and approve it, you're probably back at negative value again.

Plus, there's the problem of people doing this in an adversarial way. How can you tell whether a random commit touching 100 files is the work of an enthusiastic beginner, or a malicious hacker that's hidden a subtle attack somewhere? Well, you need to spend your time carefully checking it.

So it's way more pragmatic just to set up some automated filter to put all of this stuff in the bin.

Oh and by the way:

> I wouldn’t think a commit fixing typos ever attributed merit to a developer.

The first sentences of the article in question:

> Successful contributions to open source projects are a kind of currency. GitHub in particular encourages this in a number of ways: [...] Potential hiring managers often take note of this. Recruiters often find and screen candidates this way.

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

#104

Post by hypfer »

krisgenre wrote: post #101

While exploring an open-source project recently, I noticed a bug in the initial setup. I asked Claude to verify it, and the AI confirmed the issue. When Claude asked if I wanted to file a bug report, I agreed, assuming it would simply generate a formatted text block for me to copy and paste. However, I soon realized it had actually submitted the issue directly to GitHub. It turned out I had the GitHub CLI installed a…

> it had actually submitted the issue directly to GitHub

Did you fix that? Apologize to the people running the repo and all?

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

#105

Post by ReptileMan »

jspdown wrote: post #60
ReptileMan wrote: post #34

Create AI to review the pull requests and auto ban people for low SNR.

AI code review is nice to have an additional pair of eyes but it doesn't substitute to the maintainer eyes. A big part of a review is deciding if you want that change merged in. Not because of the immediate code but what it means to the project to bring this in. AI code review, to my eyes, just reduce the number of bugs, they do not shorten the review time. Otherwise, it means you are compromising on the direction of…

I meant AI to judge whether a PR is trash or not for ban purposes. Not AI to do the thorough code review itself.

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

#106

Post by selfhoster1312 »

bwhiting2356 wrote: post #28
smooc wrote: post #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?

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

Because letting sloperators near your codebase, even for a very minor obvious and correct change, may have long-term negative consequences for your project. It sends a signal to other sloperators to keep doing what they do, when we really need to send them a signal to get a life, learn a craft, and let Claude burn in hell.

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

#107

Post by hypfer »

jarym wrote: post #90

> raised three separate PRs to correct spelling and grammar mistakes in comments. > The changes were harmless and correct, > I closed all three PRs without comment. What is this article? I get real ‘AI slop PRs’ are nightmares - but I take that to mean the wave of AI generated PRs that read convincingly but are in the end bullshit. But your example is NOT that. The unreasonable counter to your point: don’t make spell…

There is a statistically significant correlation between comments on HN not getting the point and a GitHub user existing under the same moniker with a default pfp and no content.

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

#108

Post by Arainach »

brabel wrote: post #84
Arainach wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change is bad unless it's great. Unless the change is an obvious improvement, it has to be worth the time for the maintainers to spend attention reviewing it (and supporting the code forever, and all the rest). Even if these particular changes are "harmless" and easy to review, accepting them sets a precedent that encourages an unsustainable flood of AI-generated changes that will overwhelm the project.

That’s a totally unnecessary high bar you’re setting. Most change is mediocre (a tautology, I realize). I really don’t believe that you can think that fixing a bunch of spelling mistakes is not a small improvement. About setting a precedent: if you think like that you probably never accept any contributions at all, by humans or otherwise. Contributions by strangers have always been very minor things in general, thing…

It's not an unnecessarily high bar.

Change is bad. It takes engineers time to understand and approve. It confuses users. Changes should be made for good reasons, not frivolously.

Just because writing code is easier does not mean you should write more of it. It is more important than ever to carefully consider what you work on and what work you accept.

The user says "this is just spelling corrections" but a maintainer - a volunteer - needs to read all the files and make sure it's harmless and doesn't introduce security vulnerabilities, change meanings, and so on. That's not free.

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

#109

Post by fhd2 »

rightbyte wrote: post #97
fhd2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just speculating (I use zero automation when recruiting), but automated candidate ranking systems could well still look for signals that were valuable years ago, but no longer are. It's not a given that people using this stuff even understand the criteria under the hood. Same story as SEO, I presume. Google surely understood their ranking criteria deeply, yet couldn't exactly win that fight.

Google could have easily won that fight by blacklisting scrapping spam sites and spam portals. They just didn't. There weren't that many with high ranking. I could filter out most of them in like a week of working normally and just right clicking them with the blacklist extension in Firefox. Nowadays it is probably harder though when Google have broken the internet culture.

If you blacklist them just for yourself, the sites don't care, no economic impact. If Google does the same, they'll work around. There's lots of spam-only sites, but they also often cleverly avoid detecting by mixing in content ranked as valuable/legit. SEO also certainly "attacked" otherwise legitimate sites like Reddit, although what GEO is doing there is far worse I imagine.

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

#110

Post by jarym »

hypfer wrote: post #107
jarym wrote: post #90

> raised three separate PRs to correct spelling and grammar mistakes in comments. > The changes were harmless and correct, > I closed all three PRs without comment. What is this article? I get real ‘AI slop PRs’ are nightmares - but I take that to mean the wave of AI generated PRs that read convincingly but are in the end bullshit. But your example is NOT that. The unreasonable counter to your point: don’t make spell…

There is a statistically significant correlation between comments on HN not getting the point and a GitHub user existing under the same moniker with a default pfp and no content.

What are you talking about? My GH profile is not my HN name.

If you don’t have a valid point why post rubbish?

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