Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

I mean, AI generates spam at the behest of unreasonable people currently, and we can just think of it as a powerful automated extension of other technologies. We could say it's a new problem in quantity but the same old problem in kind.

Now, with that said I don't think we're very far from automated agents causing problems all on their own.

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Good decision. The two extremes of this decision are both bad. On one hand the status quo of a lot of slop demanding attention from busy people is just not sustainable and something has to change. But throwing out the baby with the bath water by just blanket banning all forms of AI contributions is not a long term sustainable solution. It's a stop gap solution at best. And one that would be challenged more and more as inevitably tools keep on getting better and more widely used. It's not going to take years even. Deciding to not decide right now gives people some time to think and reflect.

The right way might be to fight AI slop with AI enforced guard rails. It's not actually that hard to implement technically. You can literally just put some markdown skills in your repository and periodically have an AI bot apply the review PR skill to incoming PRs to pre-screen them and automatically close PRs that obviously fall short of well documented criteria, and label & prioritize remaining ones.

Open claw might be a bridge too far for some at this point but it's maybe a glimpse of a future where we have AI bots filtering, screening and funneling inbound information. If you are a bit handy, you can just unleash codex or code claude on your issue tracker and pull requests right now. Worth experimenting with at a small scale.

Criteria could include doing a quick code review. Is the code appropriate and minimal? Does it meet all the documented criteria? Does it fix something that is worth fixing? Does it need further review? AIs can do all sorts of things with PRs ranging from commenting to closing the PR, prioritizing it, commenting on them, or flagging it for escalation to the right person in the team. By the time a real person chooses to spend time on a PR it should have already passed a lot of quality gates and be in a decent enough shape.

A second innovation here could be doing more with reputation. Github users build up reputation by virtue of all the contributions they make over time to all sorts of projects. Also, git allows people to sign their commits. That allows AI gate keepers to sort incoming contributions by reputation. Maybe be lenient towards known repeat contributors. Give the benefit of the doubt to new contributors but scrutinize them more and be very strict on everybody else by default. In a meritocracy, you build reputation by consistently doing good work. Dumping a lot of AI slop on somebody's desk would be the opposite.

Just some thoughts. I have a few smaller github projects but I'm so far not burdened by a lot of low quality PRs.

The fact that you are engaging in this thread shows me you have considered my opinions, even if you reject them. I think thats great, even in the face of being told I advocate for the collapse of civilization and that I want others to shut up and not be heard.

It is a bit insulting, but I get that these issues are important and people feel like the stakes are sky-high: job loss, misallocation of resources, enshitification, increased social stratification, abrogation of personal responsibility, runaway corporate irresponsibility, amplification of bad actors, and just maybe that `p(doom)` is way higher than AI-optimists are willing to consider. Especially as AI makes advances into warfare, justice, and surveillance.

Even if you think AI is great, it's easy to acknowledge that all it may take is zealotry and the rot within politics to turn it into a disaster. You're absolutely right to identify that there are some eerie similarities to the "gun's don't kill people, people kill people" line of thinking.

There IS a lot to grapple with. However, I disagree with these conclusions (so far) and especially that AI is a unique danger to humanity. I also disagree that AI in any form is our salvation and going to elevate humanity to unfathomable heights (or anything close to that).

But, to bring it back to this specific topic, I think OSS projects stand to benefit (increasingly so as improvements continue) from AI and should avoid taking hardline stances against it.

Much appreciated. I find is that referencing code in conversation is hard -- e.g. "underscore foo bar" vs `_fooBar`, "this dot Ls" vs `this.els`, etc happens often. Lower-powered models especially struggle with this, and make some frustrating assumptions. Premium models do way better, and at times are shockingly good. They just aren't remotely economically viable for me.

My solution so far is to use my instructions to call out the fact that my comments are transcribed and full of errors. I also focus more on "plan + apply" flows that guide agents to search out and identify code changes before anything is edited to ensure the relevant context (and any tricky references) are clearly established in the chat context.

It's kinda like learning vim (or emacs, if you prefer). First it was all about learning shortcuts and best practices to make efficient use of the tool. Then it was about creating a good .vimrc file to further reduce the overhead of coding sessions. Then it was about distributing that .vimrc across machines (and I did a LOT of ssh-based work) for consistency. Once that was done, it became unimaginable to code any other way.

It has been even more true here: agent-based workflows are useless without significant investment in creating and maintaining good project documentation, agent instructions, and finding ways to replicate that across repos (more microservice hell! :D) for consistency. There is also some conflict, especially in corporate environments, with where this information needs to live to be properly maintained.

Best of luck!