It's good that he is upfront about it, but this surely shouldn't be taken as a general advice, since everybody has his own preferences. So this really shouldn't be a blogpost, but rather a "Contributing Guidelines" section in whatever projects he maintains.
I don't want your PRs anymore
41–50 of 148 posts
Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#42If they are willing to feed a bug report to their LLM, then perhaps they can also feed a bug report + PR to their LLM and not make a big fuss out it. Also, at the point they actively don’t want collaboration, why do open source at all? Strange times, these.
Open source is about sharing and forking, not collaboration.
Collaboration is a common pattern in larger projects but is uncommon in general
Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#43Couldn't you also just have an LLM review the PR and quickly fix any issues? Or even have it convert the PR into a list of specs, and then reimplement from there as you see fit? I guess my point being that it's become pretty easy to convert back and forth between code and specs these days, so it's all kind of the same to me. The PR at least has the benefit of offering one possible concrete implementation that can be…
Why not just have the LLM write the PR in the first place? Because LLMs are imperfect tools. At least for the foreseeable future the human in the loop is still important
Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#44It's interesting that this is the opposite of Steve Yegge's conclusion in his Vibe Maintainer article where he says he's merging 50(!) contributor PRs a day.
Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#45I have come to a similar realization recently - its what I call "Take it home OSS" - i.e. fork freely, modify it to your liking using AI coding agents, and stop waiting for upstream permissions. We seem to be gravitating towards a future where there is not much need to submit PRs or issues, except for critical bugs or security fixes. It's as if OSS is raw material, and your fork is your product.
Won't be much "raw material" left before long, if everyone takes that view.
Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#46Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#47This is only going to get worse with LLMs. Now people can "contribute" garbage code at 10x the speed. We're entering the era of the "read only" maintainer focused on self-defense.
Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#48If they are willing to feed a bug report to their LLM, then perhaps they can also feed a bug report + PR to their LLM and not make a big fuss out it. Also, at the point they actively don’t want collaboration, why do open source at all? Strange times, these.
Open source is about sharing and forking, not collaboration. Collaboration is a common pattern in larger projects but is uncommon in general
A PR, at best, is collaboration, not a transaction.
Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#49Re: I don't want your PRs anymore
#50Given that submitters are just using LLMs to produce the PR anyway, it makes sense that the author can just run that prompt himself. Just share the 'prompt' (whether or not it is actually formatted as a prompt for an LLM), which is not too different than a feature request by any other name.
+1