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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

#151

Post by senordevnyc »

inigyou wrote: post #148
selfhoster1312 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a whole. That's a very narrow view of the situation. I agree that this side of the coin exists, but there's also the other side where drinkable tap water is becoming a luxury in much of the global North, giant tornadoes and fires are sweeping the Earth, and temperatures are growing out of control. So, to make lives more comfortable with machines for…

We're already at the end of the 6th mass extinction FWIW. Over the last 200 years most species have gone extinct. There isn't that much left to make extinct. We'll manage it though.

Can you say more about this? The first link below [1] says there are an estimated eight million species today, and the second link [2] says the number of known extinct species since 1500 is 905.

1. https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/p...

2. https://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview5.htm...

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

#152

Post by watwut »

locknitpicker wrote: post #141
watwut wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are no maintainer requests. There are is a bot prompted to be obtuse and a while and then reject. What will be happening is that bot will happily talk with your but, but falsely flagged people will be antagonized and eventually angry. > you will notice that the problem isn't AI. The problem is spamming projects with PRs that are meaningless while completely ignoring maintainers. What I noticed is that this…

> But there are no maintainer requests. You should really read the comments you are replying to. The whole point of the proposal is to provide actionable feedback to the people operating these drive-by PR bots, and kick out repeat offenders to prevent them from generating noise. > What will be happening is that bot will happily talk with your but, but falsely flagged people will be antagonized and eventually angry. I…

I did read it. It is not a plan to kick repeat offendrs. It is not a plan to give actionable feedback.

This plan will kick no bots, because bots dont mind discussion with another bot. However, falsely flagged people will realize they are talking with bot prompted to be obtuse, get annoyed anf then will be banned

> the objective is to steer contributions to be aligned with the project goals

That was not the objective as stated.

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by stillpointlab »

alkonaut wrote: post #55

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…

Having a SotA model do that sounds expensive. Who is paying for that?

I think if OSS maintainers start pushing that financial burden out to potential contributors then there will be a big outcry.

OSS may become pay-to-play.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

codingisfreedom wrote: post #67
alkonaut wrote: post #55

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…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by pibaker »

tancop wrote: post #139
hypfer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why should a maintainer care about keeping PR count as a signal of developer status? A good quality contribution is a good quality contribution. You only have a responsibility to your own users, keeping out bad code from your repo while accepting as much good code as you can without getting overworked. You don't have to look after other people status games. If you judge first time contributors on accepted PRs that's…

It's less about being a maintainer and more about being on the SWE job market. Making it possible for any person to appear to be a prolific open source contributor even though his contributions are net negative for the projects he contributes to hurts the contributors who actually make improvements.

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

#157

Post by insane_dreamer »

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?

> So the fixes are still fixes,

maybe, the maintainer would need to review them to determine that, and that can be time-consuming especially because LLMs tend to provide walls of sometimes dense text

since the human submitting the PR (if there is one) couldn't be bothered to understand whether the change is a valid one (and therefore submit the change as their own work), why should the maintainer take on that work. if they wanted an LLM to find bugs in their code they could run it themselves with less work than sorting through LLM-generated PRs.

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

#158

Post by hyperadvanced »

lnsru wrote: post #83
neilv wrote: post #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 el…

Doing good work leads you nowhere. You need to be in the game of power. Be visible, know every 3 levels of managers by name. Otherwise you’re only number in payroll’s sheet. Modern tech companies are not different from world war 2 era factories imho. Account xyz@bigcompany pushing lines of code to endless repo. No face, no name. Boring. Boring reasonable and reliable. That’s not what hiring people are looking for. Yo…

For all of this fear and loathing, I am just a regular guy with a regular tech job and there are dozens of people like me at work. They’re all there because they do good work.

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

#159

Post by ValentineC »

neilv wrote: post #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 el…

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

After reading your comment, I had a thought that the key could be to separate random, drive-by open source contributions (which are easily gamed by pointing a bunch of AI agents at GitHub) from committing to maintain a small number of open source/community projects for the long term.

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

#160

Post by neilv »

ValentineC wrote: post #159
neilv wrote: post #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 el…

> IMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone. After reading your comment, I had a thought that the key could be to separate random, drive-by open source contributions (which are easily gamed by pointing a bunch of AI agents at GitHub) from committing to maintain a small number of open source/community projects for the long term.

Unfortunately, I think the appearance of long-term maintaining of an open source project would be just another gameable metric, especially with delegation to an AI slave, to make it almost zero cost.

Helicopter parents and then young adults are already long-term gaming metrics, before they start high school, just to get into college, and it seems that the same kinds of thinking persist through first job and rest of career.

Being seen as a long-term maintainer of an open source project is now trivial, compared to some of the other things people already do.

Offhand, ideas:

1. Use criteria the metrics-gamers won't think of, and don't tell them what it is. (Why this might work: the metrics-gaming mindset might blind people to thinking outside that mindset. Why this might not work: you need someone not blinded to apply the criteria.)

2. Do things that are unattractive to the metrics-gamers, but attractive to people who aren't. (Though you might still get overwhelmed by near-zero-cost AI spamming applications anyway.)

3. Accept that too many current workers were brought up with metrics-gaming mindset, and the others are too hard to find in the noise, and select and align metrics-gamers in game-theoretic ways. (Extreme example: you pay minimum wage, and there are no promotions nor titles nor performance evaluation metrics not anything except success of the company, but everyone gets real equity that's worth zero unless the team together delivers and wins, in which case everyone gets equally wealthy. The trick would be convincing the dumber metrics-gamers that they can't just nod and game this, and if they don't play like a team member for the team to win, they will be voted off the island and get zero, and possibly left in a ditch.)

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