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A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests

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31–40 of 129 posts

Re: A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests

#31
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, that's annoying, I'd take may as "CAN"

"may only" and "may not", however, are unambiguously hard limits, which makes things even more confusing.

"may only" means your pleasure is limited only to what options the agreement allows, which is a polite way of saying can not.

Re: A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am with you on hoping, someone shamelessly PRing slop just is not going to feel shame when one of their efforts fail. It’s like being mean to a phone scammer, they just hang up and do it again

I think some folks genuinely don’t realize how selfish and destructive they’re being or at least believe they help more than they hinder. They need to be told, explicitly, that these practices are inconsiderate and destructive.

We need to develop some ethics, or at least, "community standards" (as they may vary significantly between different use cases) around the some of the things this essay talks about. I know I've really been pondering the mismatch between human attention and the ability of LLMs to generate things that consume human attention.

We are still mostly running on inertia where a PR required a certain amount of human attention to generate 500 lines of proposed changes, and even then, nothing stops such PR from being garbage. But at least the rate at which such garbage PRs was bounded by the rate at which you had that very specific level of developer that was A: capable of writing 500 lines of diffs in the first place but B: didn't realize these particular 500 lines is a bad idea. Certainly not an empty set, but also certainly much more restricted than "everyone with the ability to set up a code bot and type something".

Code used to be rare, and therefore, worth a lot. Now it's not rare. 1500 lines of 2026 code is not the same as 1500 lines of 2006 code. The ceiling of the value of a contribution is in how much work the user put it and how high quality the work is. If "the work the user put in" is 30 seconds typing a prompt, that's the value, no matter how many lines of code some AI expanded that into. I'd honestly rather have an Issue filed with your proposed prompt in it than the actual output of your AI, if that's all you're going to put into the PR. There's a lot of things I can do with that prompt that may make it better but it's way harder to do that with the code.

You know, stuff like that. That might actually be a useful counter to some of these slop posts, especially things that are something that may be a good idea but need someone to treat the prompt itself as a starting point rather than the code. Maybe that's a decent response that's somewhat less hostile; close out these PRs with a request to file an Issue with the prompt instead.

Re: A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests

#34
post #30

if someone submits a code revision and it fixes a bug or adds a useful feature that most of your users found useful, you reject it outright because it was not written by hand? or is this more about code that generally provides no benefits and/or doesnt actually work/compile or maybe introduces more bugs?

If you know what you're doing, you can achieve good results with more or less any tool, including a properly-wielded coding agent. The problem is people who _don't_ know what they're doing.

Re: A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests

#38
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some folks genuinely don’t realize how selfish and destructive they’re being or at least believe they help more than they hinder. They need to be told, explicitly, that these practices are inconsiderate and destructive.

I've yet to see a slopper show any kind of shame.

I see plenty of well meaning people use ChatGPT and think they’re being helpful. You’re better off with patience and polite explanation than assuming they’re all cynical/selfish assholes trying to cut corners. Some people just get excited and don’t really think about what they’re doing. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but you should at least try to explain it to them once. Never know when you might educate someone.

Re: A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests

#39
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to see a slopper show any kind of shame.

I see plenty of well meaning people use ChatGPT and think they’re being helpful. You’re better off with patience and polite explanation than assuming they’re all cynical/selfish assholes trying to cut corners. Some people just get excited and don’t really think about what they’re doing. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but you should at least try to explain it to them once. Never know when you might educate someone.

I've seen a variety of approaches used (I'm not usually the one doing the confronting) but I still haven't seen any shame, etc. Which is weird, because it's not like it's one monolithic group? But it's still what I've seen.

It might be that people have their change of heart more privately, of course.

Re: A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests

#40

The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted exactly as how much we do not want to review your generated submission. I know it is in jest, but I really hate that so many documents include “shall”. The interpretation of which has had official legal rulings going both ways. You MUST use less ambiguo…

Many legal documents use "may" to say you must. That's why i hate legalese...

Legal documents use "may" to allow for something. Usually it only needs to be allowed so that it can happen. So I read terms of service and privacy policies like all "may" is "will". "Your data may (will) be shared with (sold to) one or more of (all of) our data processing partners. You may (will) be asked (demanded) to provide identity verification, which may (will) include (but is not limited to) [everything on your passport]." And so on.
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