Live data from Hacker News

Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

better-simple.com

161–170 of 184 posts

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#161
post #155
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, they could have stated their points much more bluntly and strongly than they did in the post. I had the same impression upon reading it. Milquetoast perfectly describes it, I am happy to see less common words used around here (specially when the convey the intended meaning this precisely), and I find claiming "affectation" of the person who used it unnecessarily rude.

Here's a good use of LLMs - asking whether this article is milquetoast. It's not. https://chatgpt.com/share/69b9be3b-a298-8009-bb21-c3afef1e5e... Moreover, that word doesn't even fit within the parent comment's context. > Incredibly milquetoast. I would not like to work with anyone who goes against these points. reply They use milquetoast as a positive thing, and the opposite of how you use it. You're unfortunately m…

A use of LLMs is when you are in your second reply and you don’t have the will to make your own argument.

The post is timid and conciliatory, spending words on some weird bargaining on all the wonderful things you can do with LLMs in preparation for a contribution. Who cares? I’m not in the Django project, but I’d think (living in These Times and all) that the thrust ought to be more about how no-effort faux contributions are wasting people’s time. At some point you can say: you’ve been warned, others have warned about this for years as well, and we don’t take kindly to you pinging us in any form.

But if someone disagrees with this milquetoast proposal or stance? If they want to defy even this and go ahead and “spend tokens” by trying to shovel unlabeled, generated code into the project? Then that’s the kind of person that I don’t want to work with. I hope that clarifies milquetoast hermeneutics.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#162
post #130
post #69

This is getting really out of control at the moment and I'm not exactly sure what the best way to fix it is, but this is a very good post in terms of expressing the why this is not acceptable and why the burden if shifting on the wrong people. Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not. One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now pa…

> One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now part of the hiring process. If I were hiring at this moment, I'd look at the ratio of accepted to rejected PRs from any potential candidate. As an open source maintainer, I look at the GitHub account that's opening a PR. If they've made a long string of identical PRs across a wide swath of unrelated repos, and most of those are…

I now want to create a public index of “slop” contributors. People need to know their “heroes”.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#163
post #75

Curious what simon thinks about using an LLM to work on Django... I've used an LLM to create patches for multiple projects. I would not have created said work without LLMs. I also reviewed the work afterward and provided tests to verify it.

> This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed. What I see now is people who are using LLMs to generate the code and write the PR description and handle the feedback from the PR review. It’s to the extent where I can’t tell if there’d be a difference if the reviewer had just used the LLM themselves. And that is a big problem. […] > If you use an LLM to cont…

I guess I feel like the LLM was the vehicle and I was complementary to it...

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anybody else in this position, would heavily plug the djangonauts program

I applied to the djangonauts twice - but was rejected both times. I always liked the idea, but perhaps my profile was not what they were looking for /shrug

Hey, Tim here. OP and one of the admins for Djangonaut Space. I know it's demoralizing to get multiple rejections. We do value people who apply multiple times and have a better system for highlighting that now. I hope you reconsider again in the future. Or if you can, go to a DjangoCon and stay for the sprints. Those tend to provide a similar energy.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#165

With my type of development, I haven't run into the types of things, directly, that you very well explained, but I have personally run into the pain, I confess, of being OVERLY reliant on LLMs. I continue to try and learn from those hard lessons and develop a set of best practices in using AI to help me avoid those pain points in the future. This growing set of best practices is helping me a lot. The reason that I li…

Thank you for the kind words! I'm happy this article resonated with you.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#167
post #69

This is getting really out of control at the moment and I'm not exactly sure what the best way to fix it is, but this is a very good post in terms of expressing the why this is not acceptable and why the burden if shifting on the wrong people. Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not. One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now pa…

Hey, thank you for the compliment!

> Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not.

I would like to think that individuals who are interested in joining an OSS community will.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#168

Great message but I wonder if the people who do everything via LLM would even care to read such a message. And at what point is it hard/impossible to judge whether something is entirely LLM or not? I sometimes struggle a lot with this being OSS maintainer myself

I appreciate the compliment. I'm not sure. I've got a few PRs that I've been putting off reviewing because they're either an Agent or someone copy-pasting the output without review. There's an investment I'm not ready to pay quite yet, but I suspect I'll include a link to this when I respond.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#169
post #86

I agree with the sentiment but I am not sure the best way to go forward. Suppose I encounter a bug in a FOSS library I am using. Suppose then that I fix the bug using Claude or something. Suppose I then thoroughly test it and everything works fine. Isn’t it kind of selfish to not try and upstream it? It was so easy prior to AI.

I think that's perfectly fine to upstream, provided there's understanding and you're communicating as yourself. Having Claude generate all the communication for you without your input makes it really, really hard to tell who you are. For some smaller packages, the review may be small and "LGTM". For others, like Django, there's going to be a few rounds of back and forth, and for that a reviewer shouldn't have to communicate with a bot without their consent. Does that make things a bit clearer?

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#170

I love Django. Ive been using it professionally and on side projects extensively for the past 10 years. Plus I maintain(ed) a couple highly used packages for Django (django-import-export and django-dramatiq). Last year, I had some free time to try to contribute back to the framework. It was incredibly difficult. Difficult to find a ticket to work on, difficult to navigate the codebase, difficult to get feedback on a…

Thank you for maintaining those packages! I've used django-import-export a few times.
Post reply on HN