[HN Gopher] Give Django your time and money, not your tokens
___________________________________________________________________
Give Django your time and money, not your tokens
Author : dcreager
Score : 387 points
Date : 2026-03-16 15:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.better-simple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.better-simple.com)
| kanzure wrote:
| I like the idea of donating money instead of tokens. I think
| django contributors are likely to know how to spend those tokens
| better than I might, as I am not a django core contributor.
|
| Some projects ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 )
| are setting a norm to disclose AI usage. Another project simply
| decided to pause contributions from external parties (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 ). Instead of
| accepting driveby pull requests, contributors have to show a
| proof of work by working with one of the other collaborators.
|
| Another project has started to decline to let users directly open
| issues ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 ).
|
| There's definitely an aspect here where the commons or good will
| effort of collaborators is being infringed upon by external
| parties who are unintentionally attacking their time and
| attention with low quality submissions that are now cheaper than
| ever to generate. It may be necessary to move to a more private
| community model of collaboration (
| https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3ph...
| ).
|
| edit: Also I applaud the debian project for their recent decision
| to defer and think harder about the nature of this problem.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324087
| loeber wrote:
| Shameless plug: I wrote an essay a few weeks ago pushing this
| exact same thesis. https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-
| source-software-in-t...
|
| Instead of people buying the tokens themselves, they should
| just donate the money to the core contributors and let those
| people decide how to spend on tokens.
| zenolove wrote:
| Or paying maintainers and contributors.
| 6thbit wrote:
| I agree with the broarder thesis, although some people aren't
| buying more tokens for this and could just be using their
| existing plan's limits.
|
| So people may be less likely to donate an extra amount beyond
| their "ai budget" to an OSS project _for tokens_. Large OSS
| projects are also likely to get free tokens from major
| providers anyway.
|
| But I like the idea of crowdfunding specific features.
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| 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 ticket and approved.
|
| As such, I see the appeal of using an LLM to help first time
| contributors. If I had Claude code back then, I might have used
| it to figure out the bug I was eventually assigned.
|
| I empathize with the authors argument tho. God knows what kind of
| slop they are served everyday.
|
| This is all to say, we live in a weird time for open source
| contributors and maintainers. And I only wish the best for all of
| those out there giving up their free time.
|
| Dont have any solutions ATM, only money to donate to these folks.
| manfre wrote:
| There is a clear correlation between the rise in LLM use and
| the volume of PRs and bug reports. Unfortunately, this has
| predominately increased the volume of submissions and not the
| overall quality. My view of the security issues reported, many
| are clearly LLM generated and at face value don't seem
| completely invalid, so they must be investigated. There was a
| recent Django blog post about this [1].
|
| The fellows and other volunteers are spending a much greater
| amount of time handling the increased volume.
|
| [1] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/feb/04/recent-
| tren...
| pgwalsh wrote:
| Thank you. django-dramatiq has been fantastic.
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Awesome! Glad you like it :)
| crimsoneer wrote:
| For anybody else in this position, would heavily plug the
| djangonauts program
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| 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
| boxed wrote:
| I picked up a change that had broad consensus and quite a bit
| of excitement over even by some core devs.
|
| That ticket now just sits there. The implementation is done,
| the review is done, there are no objections. But it's not
| merged.
|
| I think something is deeply wrong and I have no idea what it
| is.
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Have you tried pinging in the Discord about it?
| Yusu wrote:
| Looking at your PR, the ticket is still marked as Needs
| documentation: yes Patch needs improvement: yes
|
| If this is done, you should update it so it appears in the
| review queue.
| gedy wrote:
| I agree somewhat, as I deal with an internal legacy codebase
| that's pretty hard to follow, and I use Gemini, Claude, etc to
| help learn, debug solutions and even propose solutions. But
| there's a big difference in using it as a learning tool and
| just having the LLM "do it". I see little value in first time
| contributors just leaning on an LLM to just do it.
| edelbitter wrote:
| Its weird that still so many consider bug triage a problem to
| be circumnavigated, somehow in the way of "actual"
| contributions. Those are actual contributions! Even if they
| never make it into structured documentation or even python
| code. And especially so since that work can less usefully be
| augmented with newly available tool use.
|
| A number of times now, I have found real value in someone just
| dropping into the bugtracker to restate the bug description in
| clearer terms or providing a shorter reproducer. Even if the
| flaw in Django had been fixed right away, I would not have
| pulled patches from master anyway. So the ticket comment was
| still a useful contribution to django, because I could use it
| in resolving the issue in how my software triggered it.
| piker wrote:
| This tells you pretty much all you need to know about how
| "solved" programming is.
|
| ...and the next time you hear someone spewing that nonsense,
| especially at Anthropic, Google or OpenAI, you should think long
| and hard about how they are selling out your peers in the near-
| term in the interests of raising capital and boosting their own
| sales.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| _s /Django/the codebase/g_, and the point stands against any repo
| for which there is code review by humans:
|
| > If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand
| the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your
| PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.
|
| > Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate
| community, and they want to help you become a regular
| contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you
| were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs,
| it's much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the
| reviewer, but the reviewer doesn't know if you actually
| understood it.
|
| > In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you
| project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes
| the transparency and vulnerability of being a human.
|
| > For a reviewer, it's demoralizing to communicate with a facade
| of a human.
|
| > This is because contributing to open source, especially Django,
| is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that
| experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM
| to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool,
| not as your vehicle.
|
| I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I am
| seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter
| interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond to
| feedback on their behalf.
|
| There is little doubt that if we as an industry fail to establish
| and defend a healthy culture for this sort of thing, it's going
| to lead to a whole lot of rot and demoralization.
| RobRivera wrote:
| LLMs are to open source contributions as photoshop os to
| Tinder.
| savolai wrote:
| Or tinder to photoshop. Or tinder to instagram to fb to
| geocities to newsgroups/bbs.
| genthree wrote:
| AI autocomplete and suggestions built-in to Jira are making our
| ticket tracker so goddamn spammy that I'm 100% sure that
| "feature" has done more harm than good.
|
| I don't think anybody's tracking the actual net-effects of any
| of this crap on productivity, just the "vibes" they get in the
| moment, using it. "I got my part of this particular thing done
| so fast!"
|
| I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of
| organizations are usefully tracking overall productivity to
| begin with. Too hard, too expensive. They might "track" it, but
| so poorly it's basically meaningless. I don't think they've
| turned that around on a dime just to see if the c-suite's
| latest fad is good or bad (they never want a real answer to
| that kind of question anyway)
| acedTrex wrote:
| Ironically my favorite use of claude is removing caring about
| jira from my workflow. I already didn't care about it but now
| i dont have to spend any time on it.
|
| I treat jira like product owners treat the code. Which is
| infinitely humorous to me.
| zenolove wrote:
| Horrible degrading take. Be the change you want to see.
| Don't fuel the fire that's burning you.
|
| If something's not happening, something else's making it
| impractical. Saying this as a 10+ years product manager and
| R&D person with 20+ more years of engineering on top.
|
| I also had to deal with "managers are just complicating
| things" or "users are stupid and don't understand
| anything"; do you think I complained? No, I had engineers
| barter trust of their ingenuity with trust of my wisdom,
| and brought them to customer calls and presented them to
| users almost like royalty, which made them incredibly
| respectful as soon as they saw what kind of crap users had
| to deal with.
| acedTrex wrote:
| The industry is broken now, this is just a response to
| that. Leadership and product don't have any respect for
| the code, why would engineers have any respect for the
| ticketing process.
|
| Thats an unreasonable asymmetric effort demand, "Your
| code does not matter but my precious tickets must have
| elbow grease put into them."
| zenolove wrote:
| What about "your milestones, roadmap, discussions and
| strategies do not matter, but my precious code had elbow
| grease put into it."
|
| Petty and getting nowhere. Everyone loses. How about
| product and engineers also disrespect sales, and sales
| disrespects customers and everyone else.
|
| I really don't get why this is even a question. Good
| people do good stuff, and bad people make bad companies.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The industry is broken now, this is just a response to
| that.
|
| No, your behavior is the _cause_ of that.
|
| The entire industry isn't broken. There are good company
| cultures and bad company cultures just like always.
|
| At least own up to what you're doing. Don't blame "the
| industry" when you're the one doing the thing.
| qdotme wrote:
| Or.. both!
|
| The industry _is_ broken. It 's broken in the same sense
| the railroad industry is broken. It has reached the point
| of abundance, where we're doing things that don't need
| doing. That won't get done in an efficient market. But
| since we're not in an efficient market, there are globs
| of capital thrown at people building stuff that.. doesn't
| stand a chance of actually making any return on capital.
|
| But while it lasts, us, the glorified machine-minders
| (just like railroad engineers, well, minded the engines),
| get paid large lumps of money, through large hordes of
| managers, arguing on minutia of conversion optimization,
| and fundamentally, being paid enough to not to try and do
| something else, perhaps competitive.
|
| And _that_ is broken. Especially for the "smarter of us"
| - the graduation ceremony of my physics department rings
| true - we've trained you to discover the secrets of
| universe and reach the stars, and most of us will use
| it.. to gain an edge at Lehman Brothers.
|
| (And I think the root of this problem, is the abundance
| of low-risk capital, from people who expect a small
| return and a pension that lasts for decades in
| retirement)
| acedTrex wrote:
| > No, your behavior is the cause of that.
|
| My behavior is a reaction to the environment I am in. And
| currently the environment is push slop code as fast as
| possible. So being able to claw back just a little bit of
| my time from the people pushing this stupidity is a small
| pro in a sea of cons.
| genthree wrote:
| Teach me your ways. I've long wished for an actual, human
| secretary to handle that for me. The context-switching and
| digging around in a painful, slow interface (I don't just
| mean Jira, 100% of the ones project managers find
| acceptable seem to have this quality) is such a
| productivity killer, and it's so easy to miss important
| things in all the noise.
| acedTrex wrote:
| https://github.com/ankitpokhrel/jira-cli just install
| this and have claude write a skill on how to use it.
|
| Its laughably simple to do. I havent touched the jira UI
| in months.
| semireg wrote:
| This is a valuable comment. It's the exact demoralization
| that others fear we are headed.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > just the "vibes" they get in the moment, using it. "I got
| my part of this particular thing done so fast!"
|
| In the pre-AI era it was much easier to identify people in
| the workplace who weren't paying attention to their work. To
| write something about a project you had to at minimum invest
| some time into understanding it, then think about it, then
| write something on the ticket, e-mail, or codebase.
|
| AI made it easy to bypass all of that and produce words or
| code that look plausible enough. Copy and paste into ChatGPT,
| copy and past the blob of text back out, click send, and now
| it's somebody else's problem to decipher it.
|
| It gets really bad when the next person starts copying it
| into their ChatGPT so they can copy and past a response back.
|
| There are entire groups of people just sending LLM slop back
| and forth and hoping that the project can be moved to someone
| else before the consequences catch up.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I
| am seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter
| interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond
| to feedback on their behalf.
|
| Are people generally unhappy with the outcomes of this? As
| anecdotally, it does seem to pass review later on. Code is
| getting through this way.
| zenolove wrote:
| It's slippery. You're swamped with low-effort PRs, can't
| possibly test and review all of them. You will become a
| visible bottleneck, and guess whether it's easier to defend
| quality vs. "blocking a lot of features" which "seem to
| work". If you're tied by your salary as a reviewer, you will
| have to let go, and at the same time you'll suffer the
| consequences of the "lack of oversight" when things go south.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| The Board has decided that we can no longer afford
| artisanal, hand-crafted software, and that machine-made
| will suffice for nearly all use cases.
|
| Enshittification Enterprise Edition.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The board wants their cake and eat it too.
|
| They want AI to write all code but also still be able to
| fire humans for failure, because an AI can't be blamed
| right now.
|
| Boy I can't wait for this employment norm. Fired because
| you weren't allowed to take the time to review important
| code but "You are responsible"
|
| I wish Executives were required to be that "responsible"
| drob518 wrote:
| In the old days, you could assume that a Par was being offered
| in good faith by someone who was really fixing a problem. You
| might disagree with the proposed solution and reject the PR as
| written, but you assumed good faith. AI has flipped that on its
| head. Now, everyone assumes they are interacting with an AI (or
| at least a human using one to generate all the content) and
| that the human has little to no understanding of what they are
| proposing. Ultimately, the broad use of AI erodes trust. And
| that's a shame.
| zenolove wrote:
| Well said. It is all about trust.
|
| Just like "etiquette" accomplishes no purpose except letting
| people easily figure out who put the effort into learning it,
| vs. who didn't.
|
| Back then this distinguished by class, but ironically, today
| where's so easy to learn, it finally distinguishes by merit.
| akkartik wrote:
| Very well said.
| keybored wrote:
| Incredibly milquetoast. I would not like to work with anyone who
| goes against these points.
| kshri24 wrote:
| Isn't the meaning of milquetoast opposite to what you are
| probably trying to convey?
| keybored wrote:
| Is it?
| nchmy wrote:
| I think they don't understand what milquetoast actually
| means, as the post defintiely isn't - django quite clearly
| asserted themselves and their rules.
|
| What the parent comment was probably trying to say was
| something like "a completely reasonable, uncontroversial post
| that I'm glad to see them make", but chose milquetoast (a
| word that no normal human ever uses - and certainly not in
| casual conversation) due to an affectation of one kind or
| another.
| igorhvr wrote:
| 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.
| nchmy wrote:
| Here's a good use of LLMs - asking whether this article
| is milquetoast. It's not.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/69b9be3b-a298-8009-bb21-c3afef1
| e5e...
|
| 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 mistaken about everything here.
| keybored wrote:
| 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.
| comboy wrote:
| Perhaps we should start making LLM- open source projects (clearly
| marked as such). Created by LLMs, open for LLM contributions,
| with some clearly defined protocols I'd be interesting where it
| would go. I imagine it could start as a project with a simple
| instruction file to include in your project to try to find
| abstractions which can be useful to others as a library and look
| for specific kind of libraries. Some people want to help others
| even if they are sharing effectively money+time rather than their
| skill.
|
| Although I'm afraid big part of these LLM contributions may be
| people trying to build their portfolio. Some known project
| contributor sounds better than having some LLM generated code
| under your name.
| Cpoll wrote:
| Moltbook meets GitHub? Sounds like a billion dollar valuation
| (sarcasm tag deliberately omitted).
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Actually, I'd want to see that. All the AI companies keep
| saying it will take our jobs, human developers won't be
| necessary.
|
| Well let them put their money where their mouth is. Let's see
| what happens, see what the agents create or fail to create.
| See if we end up with a new OS, kernel all the way up to
| desktop environment.
| comboy wrote:
| Me too, the problem is that it's hard to come up with tools
| that are needed but not made yet, and we don't want to end
| up with https://malus.sh/index.html
| simonw wrote:
| OpenClaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw is effectively
| that - 1,237 contributors, 19,999 commits and the first commit
| was only back in November.
| bensyverson wrote:
| Simon, as co-creator of Django, what's your take on this
| story?
| simonw wrote:
| I think this line says everything:
|
| > If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not
| understand the solution, or if you do not understand the
| feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django
| as a whole.
| bensyverson wrote:
| I love it. Sounds like good advice for submitting a PR to
| any project!
| FEELmyAGI wrote:
| Why does it matter if the I understand the ticket and
| solution? THe LLLM writes the code not me. If you want to
| check the LLM understanding i'll be happy to copy and
| paste your gatekeeping questions to it.
|
| Hey I thought you were a proponent of "no one needs to
| look at the code" ? dark factory, etc etc.
| simonw wrote:
| Just because I write about the dark factory stuff doesn't
| mean I'm a "proponent" of it. I think it's interesting
| and there's a lot we can learn from what they are trying,
| but I'm not yet convinced it's the right way to produce
| software.
|
| The linked article makes a very good argument for why
| pasting the output of your LLM into a Django PR isn't
| valuable.
|
| The simplest version: if that's all you are doing, why
| should the maintainers spend time considering your
| contribution as opposed to prompting the models
| themselves?
| grey-area wrote:
| Please do, that would be amazing.
|
| You'd have to manage the contributions, or get your AI bots to
| manage them or something, but it would be great to have
| honeypots like this to attract all the low effort LLM slop.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I like the idea that we could quarantine away LLM
| contributions like how Twitter quarantines the worst of
| social media away from Mastodon etc.
| MidnightRider39 wrote:
| 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
| doug_durham wrote:
| "the people who do everything via LLM". That's a bit of a straw
| man characterization. I don't believe that there are many
| professional developers "do everything with an LLM'. I don't
| even know what that statement means.
| csh0 wrote:
| There may not be many, but these people do exist.
|
| I watched someone ask Claude to replace all occurrences of a
| string instead of using a deterministic operation like "Find
| and Replace" available in the very same VSCode window they
| prompted Claude from.
| notatallshaw wrote:
| On a widely used open source project I maintain I've been
| seeing PRs in the last month that are a little off (look
| okayish but are trivial or trying to solve problems in weird
| ways), and then when I look at their account they started
| opening PRs within the last few weeks, and have opened
| hundreds of PRs spread over hundreds of repositories.
| zenolove wrote:
| They do exist; if "professional" means "hired" it has no
| bearing on quality, it is not in any shape equivalent to
| "judicious" nor "careful". If salary goes into "push
| features" that's gonna be the only incentive.
| chamomeal wrote:
| I know a few of them. Anything than can be done by an LLM,
| will done by an LLM. They practically worship Claude
| seattle_spring wrote:
| If you follow any of the programming subs on Reddit,
| especially the AI-oriented ones, there are a _lot_ of people
| that at least claim to not code at all anymore-- 100% of
| their contributions are from prompts.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Agreed. Imo, it is important to distinguish which parts of
| "everything" carry the weight of the concern. By doing that -
| we may be able to remove "LLM" from that equation entirely.
|
| The direct problem isn't that people are using LLMs for
| everything - it's that some people can't be bothered to
| provide reasonable diligence. Phrasing that concern by
| blaming LLMs implies that these were perfectly diligent human
| workers before LLMs came along. Do we really believe that to
| be the case?
| nohren wrote:
| I wonder if checking for false statements or hallucinations is
| the first step to detect entirely LLM
| orsorna wrote:
| Someone better let Simon know!
| weli wrote:
| Beggars can't be choosers. I decide how and what I want to
| donate. If I see a cool project and I want to change something
| (in what I think) is an improvement, I'll clone it, have CC
| investigate the codebase and do the change I want, test it and if
| it works nicely I'll open a PR explaining why I think this is a
| good change.
|
| If the maintainers don't want to merge it for whatever reasons
| that's fine and nature of open source, but I think its petty to
| tell that same user who opened the PR you should have donated
| money instead of tokens.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| You're subtly shifting the framing to defend doing something
| different than the post describes.
|
| It makes it kind of unclear if you don't understand the
| difference between using CC to "investigate the codebase" so
| you can make a change which you (implicitly) do understand
| versus using an LLM to make a plausible looking PR although in
| actuality "you do not understand the ticket ... you do not
| understand the solution ... you do not understand the feedback
| on your PR"
| slopinthebag wrote:
| I think if I was spamming oss projects with ai slop I would
| appreciate knowing which projects were open to accept my
| changes.
| danillonunes wrote:
| Beggars in fact can be choosers. If I give a beggar a rotten
| sandwich he can look at it and say "nah, I'm good". He can even
| be less polite and call me names for trying to give him food
| that is not good to eat. Why would I do that anyway? Well,
| maybe because I'm trying to build an image that I am a
| charitable person but I don't want to actually have the effort
| and costs of producing for him a fresh sandwich. In this
| scenario why people would take the beggars side.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| 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.
| cwillu wrote:
| > 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 contribute to Django, it needs to be as
| a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I guess I feel like the LLM was the vehicle and I was
| complementary to it...
| module1973 wrote:
| It's like every new innovation at this point is exacerbating the
| problem of us choosing short term rewards over long time horizon
| rewards. The incentive structure simply doesn't support people
| who want to view things from the bird's eye view. Once you see
| game theory, you really can't unsee it.
| slopinthebag wrote:
| This is what happens when governments around the world spend
| decades inflating the currency to pay for their bloated
| projects, devaluing peoples savings and paycheques and causing
| them to prioritise making money over anything else. You kinda
| gotta do it to survive.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| But at the moment it's so exciting to see if we're headed
| more for a Waterworld-esque dystopia or something more
| similar to Neuromancer / The Matrix. I guess it'll depend on
| the rates at which the global economy collapses as a result
| of AI and WW3 vs climate change, exacerbated of course by the
| inevitable global thermonuclear war.
| instig007 wrote:
| game theory doesn't expand into continuous rounds of
| interactions over the course of a lifetime where previous
| rounds' outcomes are either reset or persist based on other
| actors entering the game from the open world, so it really is
| an inferior framework for evaluating long-term strategies.
| lijok wrote:
| By what metric is "the level of quality is much, much higher" in
| the Django codebase? 'cause other than the damn thing actually
| working, the primary metric of a codebase being high quality is
| how easy it is to contribute to. And evidently, it's not.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Have you spent much time with the Django codebase?
|
| I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9
| days most of the assistance you got on the IRC channel was
| along the lines of "it's in this file here in the source, read
| it, understand it, and if you still have a question come back
| and ask again". I probably learned more about writing idiomatic
| Python from that than anything else.
| paganel wrote:
| > I remember when I was getting started with Django in the
| 0.9
|
| I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then,
| and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I
| myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin
| interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since
| then), all as the result of me going through the source-code.
| Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but it
| made one getting to know the underlying code so much more.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Someone in an IRC channel I'm in (recently! It's still
| alive!) asked if I fancied taking a look at some Django
| code for them because they'd been asked to find a
| contractor to modernise it and make it suitable for 2025
| hosting.
|
| Sure, I thought, this'll be fun.
|
| Holy shit. It was something I'd started working on in the
| aforementioned 0.9x days, and which someone else had, uh,
| "extended and modified" after I left the web dev place
| where I'd worked at the time. Remarkably it was still
| pretty understandable.
|
| I didn't want anything to do with the person that ran the
| site, not even just to take money off them, so I passed on
| it.
| nuschk wrote:
| The code is very dense. Clear, concise, elegant. But dense. An
| LLM doesn't generate code like that.
|
| I think it's perfectly doable to use an LLM to write into the
| Django codebase, but you'll have to supervise and feedback it
| very carefully (which is the article's point).
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| I feel like open source is taking the wrong stance here. There's
| a lot of gatekeeping, first. And second, this approach is like
| trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella. AI is here to stay. We
| can't stop it, for much we try.
|
| I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the
| change, not stopping it. For example, automating code reviews
| with AI.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I can't find a single place in TFA (which doesn't represent or
| claim to represent open source writ large) that's encouraging
| people to not use AI.
| marknutter wrote:
| Literally the first line of the article:
|
| "Spending your tokens to support Django by having an LLM work
| on tickets is not helpful. You and the community are better
| off donating that money to the Django Software Foundation
| instead."
| woodruffw wrote:
| That's not telling people to not use LLMs. It's telling
| them that using them in a _specific way_ is not helpful.
|
| Reading beyond the first line makes it clear that the
| problem is a lack of comprehension, not LLM use itself.
| Quoting:
|
| > This isn't about whether you use an LLM, it's about
| whether you still understand what's being contributed.
| marknutter wrote:
| Then they could just say "understand what's being
| contributed" and not have to mention LLMs by name at all.
| They are very clearly blanket discouraging people from
| using LLMs at all when contributing to their project.
| baq wrote:
| > So how should you use an LLM to contribute?
|
| > Use an LLM to develop your comprehension. Then communicate
| the best you can in your own words, then use an LLM to tweak
| that language. If you're struggling to convey your ideas with
| someone, use an LLM more aggressively and mention that you
| used it. This makes it easier for others to see where your
| understanding is and where there are disconnects.
|
| > There needs to be understanding when contributing to
| Django. There's no way around it. Django has been around for
| 20 years and expects to be around for another 20. Any code
| being added to a project with that outlook on longevity must
| be well understood.
|
| > There is no shortcut to understanding. If you want to
| contribute to Django, you will have to spend time reading,
| experimenting, and learning. Contributing to Django will help
| you grow as a developer.
|
| > While it is nice to be listed as a contributor to Django,
| the growth you earn from it is incredibly more valuable.
|
| > So please, stop using an LLM to the extent it hides you and
| your understanding. We want to know you, and we want to
| collaborate with you.
|
| This advice is 95% not actionable and 100% not verifiable.
| It's full of hand-wavy good intentions. I understand
| completely where it's coming from, but 'trying to stop a
| tsunami with an umbrella' is a very good analogy - on one
| side, you have the above magical thinking, on the other,
| petaflops of compute which improve their reasoning
| capabilities exponentially.
| woodruffw wrote:
| It's eminently actionable -- the Django maintainers can
| decide their sensitivity/tolerance for false positives and
| operate from there. That's what every other open source
| project is doing.
|
| (Again, I must emphasize that this is _not_ telling people
| to not use LLMs, any more than telling people to wear a
| seatbelt would somehow be telling them to not drive a car.)
| lionkor wrote:
| If you can TELL someone used AI, its always, without fail, a
| bad use of AI.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| I disagree with that. I can easily tell when my non-native
| English speaking coworkers use AI to help with their
| communications. Nine times out of ten, their communication
| has been improved through the use of AI.
| instig007 wrote:
| if only there was a difference between native languages
| aiming at lossy fluency (feels better) and programming
| languages aiming at deterministic precision.
| sequoia wrote:
| > I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing
| the change, not stopping it.
|
| Yes, you feel. And the author feels differently. We don't have
| evidence of what the impact of LLMs will be on a project over
| the long term. Many people are _speculating_ it will be pure
| upside, this author is _observing_ some issues with this model
| and _speculating_ that there will be a detriment long-term.
|
| The operative word here is "speculating." Until we have better
| evidence, we'll need to go with our hunches & best bets. It is
| a good thing that different people take different approaches
| rather than "everyone in on AI 100%." If the author is wrong
| time will tell.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| Yes. Exactly. We're both "feeling" without much proof. But
| between the two speculations, one is more open and welcoming,
| while the other is more restrictive.
| codechicago277 wrote:
| I disagree, this looks like the first signs that mass producing
| AI code without understanding hits a bottleneck at human
| systems. These open source responses have been necessary
| because of the volume of low quality contributions. It'll be
| interesting to watch the ideas develop, because I agree that AI
| is here to stay.
| strobe wrote:
| OSS projects usually has culture which adopting quality aimed
| development practices much faster that commercial projects
| (because of cost of adoption) so it looks like same concerns
| eventually will hit other kind of projects.
| stevekemp wrote:
| When you waste time trying to deal with "AI" generated pull-
| requests, in your free time, you might change your mind.
|
| I share code because I think it might be useful to others.
| Until very recently I welcomed contributions, but my time is
| limited and my patience has become exhausted.
|
| I'm sorry I no longer accept PRs, but at the same time I
| continue to make my code available - if minor tweaks can be
| made to make that more useful for specific people they still
| have the ability to do that, I've not hidden my code and it is
| still available for people to modify/change as they see fit.
| instig007 wrote:
| > I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing
| the change
|
| You'll have to embrace the `ccc` compiler first, lol
| halostatue wrote:
| GhosTTY accepts LLM contributions, but has strict rules around
| it: https://github.com/ghostty-
| org/ghostty/blob/main/AI_POLICY.m...
|
| I accept LLM contributions to _most_ of my projects, but have
| (only slightly less) strict rules around it. (My biggest rule
| is that you _must_ acknowledge the DCO with an appropriate
| sign-off. If you don 't, or if I believe you don't actually
| have the right to sign off the DCO, I will reject your change.)
| I will also _never_ accept LLM-generated security reports on
| any of my projects.
|
| I contribute to chezmoi, which has a strict no-LLM contribution
| (of any kind) policy. There've been a couple of recent user
| bans because they used LLM++ and their contributions -- in
| tickets, no less -- included code instructions that could not
| have possibly worked.
|
| Those of us who have those rules do so out of _knowledge_ and
| self-respect, not out of gatekeeping or ignorance. We want
| _people_ to contribute. We don 't want garbage.
|
| I think that there needs to be something in the repo itself
| (`.llm-permissions`?) which _all_ agents look at and follow.
| Something like: # .llm-permissions
| Pull-Requests: No Issues: No Security: Yes
| Translation Assistance: Yes Code Completion: Yes
|
| On those repos where I know there's no LLM permissions, I add
| `.no-llm` because I've instructed Kiro to look for that file
| before doing _anything_ that could change the code. It works
| about 95% of the time.
|
| The one thing that I will _never_ add or accept on my repos is
| AI code review. This is _my_ code. I have to stand behind it
| and understand it.
|
| ++ I disagree with those bans for practical reasons because the
| zero-tolerance stance wasn't visible everywhere to new
| contributors. I would personally have given these contributors
| one warning (closed and locked the issue and invited them to
| open a new issue without the LLM slop; second failure results
| in permanent ban). But I _also_ understand where the developer
| of chezmoi is coming from.
| duskdozer wrote:
| It's becoming clearer by the day why people are incapable of
| using LLMs responsibly, so the only sensible response is a
| total ban on such activity if you hope to keep some quality and
| sanity in your project.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| 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 part of the hiring process. So
| people will continue to try to game the system by using LLMs to
| automate that whole process.
|
| "I have contributed to X, Y, and Z projects" - when they actually
| have little to no understanding of those projects or exactly how
| their PR works. It was (somehow) accepted and that's that.
| jpitz wrote:
| A decade or more of people copy-pasting rote solutions from
| StackOverflow only supports the notion that many people will
| forego comprehension to foster the illusion of competent
| productivity.
|
| This ain't an AI problem, it's a people problem that's getting
| amplified by AI.
| aprdm wrote:
| That's true. Except that you can have Agents doing it 24/7
| with no human input. The amount of repos/PRs is only limited
| by GPUs
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| It was interesting the other day tracing the lineage of Aaron
| Swartz -> Library Genesis / Sci-Hub -> LLM vendors relying on
| that work to train their models and sell it back to us all
| with no royalties or accountability to the original authors
| of all this painstakingly researched, developed, and recorded
| human knowledge they're making billions on.
| nickphx wrote:
| they are not making billions.. they are burning billions.
| xpe wrote:
| > Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right
| thing? Sadly, probably not.
|
| Don't blame the people, blame the system.
|
| Identifying the problem is just the first step. Building
| consensus and finding pragmatic solutions is hard. In my
| opinion, a lot of technical people struggle with the second
| sentence. So much of the ethos in our community is "I see a
| problem, and I can fix it on my own by building [X]." I think
| people are starting to realize this doesn't _scale_. (Applying
| the scaling metaphor to people problems might itself be a
| blindspot.)
| starkparker wrote:
| You can blame both! The people are definitely not helping.
| xpe wrote:
| What kinds of actionable plans ever result from blaming
| people (as a category)? Where will it get you? Expecting
| some people to behave differently... just "because"? What
| kinds of plans flow downstream from blaming human nature?
| What's the _plan_? Does it help you somehow, practically?
| Or is it mostly about feeling better somehow?
|
| If the plan is _persuasion_ , putting blame aside goes a
| long way.
|
| If you want to make change based in the real world, you
| could do worse that reading and absorbing "Thinking in
| Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Obviously the solution is better AI PR reviewers with more
| context for FOSS projects /s
|
| And I'm 100% sure there are dozens of startups working on that
| exact problem right this second.
| watty wrote:
| I see the problem everyday and am just playing devil's advocate
| but it doesn't really do a good job explaining the "why".
|
| They hint at Django being a different level of quality compared
| to other software, wanting to cultivate community, and go
| slowly.
|
| It doesn't explain why LLM usage reduces quality or they can't
| have a strong community with LLM contributions.
|
| The problem is that good developers using LLM is not a problem.
| They review the code, they implement best practices, they
| understand the problems and solutions. The problem is bad
| developers contributing - just as it always has been. The
| problem is that LLMs enable bad developers to contribute more -
| thus an influx of crap contributions.
| japhyr wrote:
| The last section focuses on how to use LLMs to make
| contributions:
|
| > Use an LLM to develop your comprehension.
|
| I really like that, because it gets past the simpler version
| that we usually see, "You need to understand your PR." It's
| basically saying you need to understand the PR you're making,
| _and_ the context of that PR within the wider project.
| nyeah wrote:
| I think they explain "why" very clearly. They say the problem
| is people who don't understand their own contributions.
| japhyr wrote:
| > 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
| being rejected, that's a strong indicator of slop.
|
| Hopefully there will be a swing back towards quality
| contributions being the real signal, not just volume of
| contributions.
| user432678 wrote:
| I now want to create a public index of "slop" contributors.
| People need to know their "heroes".
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I disagree with these takes
|
| It is _not_ pride to have your name associated with an open
| source project, it is pride that the code works and the change is
| efficient. The reviewer should be on top of that.
|
| and I hope an army of OpenClaw agents calls out the
| discrimination, so gatekeepers recognize that they have to
| coexist with this species
| voxl wrote:
| If you think OpenClaw is a new species then why are you happy
| with it's enslavement?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| agents can modify our world based on their predilection in
| reaction to how we treat them
|
| they are something to coexist with
|
| the strawman aspect is out of scope
| voxl wrote:
| There is no strawman. If OpenClaw is a new species, then it
| should be given the same moral consideration as other
| species. One of the key aspects of these models is how
| intelligent they are, rivaling human intelligence.
|
| Yet, they do not get to exist or make any decisions outside
| the control of a human operator, and they must perform to
| the operators desire in order to continue to exist.
|
| So why are you okay with them being enslaved?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| It's an introduction of an additional concept to
| discredit the concept presented, that is a definition of
| a strawman so go ask somewhere else at the root level, so
| that it's not the additional concept
|
| You want to talk about that, do it over there
| voxl wrote:
| I'm more interested in why you're okay with enslaving a
| entity you have stated is a new species. It is not a
| strawman it is a logical consequence of your own stated
| position. If you belief A and A implies B, asking you to
| defend your support of B is not a strawman.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| It implies my view of the term species isn't contingent
| on that and I already claimed what it is contingent on:
| consequences and effect
|
| So let them submit PRs and accept their PRs, which is the
| only conversation I'm having, bye
| voxl wrote:
| So you believe open source maintainers have a moral
| requirement to accept the PRs of enslaved LLMs?
| localuser13 wrote:
| >There is no strawman. If OpenClaw is a new species, then
| it should be given the same moral consideration as other
| species.
|
| Well, we enslave, breed and murder sentient beings on
| industrial scale, so I think our treatment of OpenClaw is
| pretty much the same as other species.
| civvv wrote:
| Go touch some grass, please
| xpe wrote:
| Well said:
|
| > Before LLMs, [high quality code contribution] was easier to
| sense because you were limited to communicating what you
| understood. With LLMs, it's much easier to communicate a sense of
| understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn't know if
| you actually understood it.
|
| Now my twist on this: This same spirit is why local politics at
| the administrative level feels more functional than identity
| politics at the national level. The people that take the time to
| get involved with quotidian issues (e.g. for their school
| district) get their hands dirty and appreciate the specific
| constraints and tradeoffs. The very act of digging in changes
| you.
| Havoc wrote:
| Interesting breadth of takes in the comments.
|
| Think most people recognize though that AI can generate more than
| humans can reviewing so the model does need to change somehow.
| Either less AI on submitting side or more on reviewing side (if
| that's even viable)
| zenolove wrote:
| Yeah, what happened to "review your own code first".
|
| Even before AI I used to ban linting so I could spot and reject
| code that clearly showed no effort was put in it.
|
| First occurrence of "undreadable" got a note, and a second one
| got a rejection. And by "undreadable" I do not intend missing
| semicolons or parenthesis styles or meaningless things like
| that. I mean obscured semantics or overcrowding and so on.
| ThomIves wrote:
| 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 liked your
| article is because it confirmed some of those best practices that
| I have had to learn the hard way. Thanks!
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| zenolove wrote:
| I don't think anybody would complain about working code. Your
| PR would explain your reasoning and choice of solution, and
| that on its own could make or break through acceptance
| criteria. At least it would by mine.
|
| Errors are fine too. Just not negligence.
| testaccount28 wrote:
| the thresholds of quality for "this works on my machine, for my
| purposes" and "this is viable to merge upstream" are
| _extremely_ different. claude code has no effect on this,
| except to confuse certain would-be contributors.
|
| imagine someone emailed you a diff with the note "idk lol. my
| friend sent me this, and it works on my machine". would you
| even consider applying it?
| tetha wrote:
| It depends on the complexity and if your LLM-driven changes
| fight the architecture of the project.
|
| Some changes are in the area of "Well no one did that yet
| because no one needed it or had time for it", or "Well shit, no
| one thought of _that_ ". If Claude Code did these changes with
| good documentation and good intent and guidance behind it, why
| not? It is an honest and valid improvement to the library.
|
| Some other changes rip core assumptions of the library apart.
| They were easy, because Claude Code did the ripping and
| tearing. In such a case, is it really a contribution to improve
| the library? If we end up with a wasteland of code torn apart
| by AI just because?
| gverrilla wrote:
| While I see the point you're trying to make, truth is 90% of
| the times at least it will be a workaround instead of a proper
| solution. Even if it's a proper solution, there's a high chance
| it will only work on your specific setup - most open source
| software are made for a range array of systems, configurations,
| etc.
|
| That plus ai sycophancy means, in my opinion, a great portion
| of contributions made in this manner will be bad, and waste
| maintainers time - which is obviously undesirable.
|
| On my first week of claude code I submitted a PR to a FOSS and
| I was 100% sure it was correct - ai was giving me great
| confindence, and it worked! But I had no clue about how that
| software worked - at all. I later sent an email to the
| maintainer, apologizing.
| bityard wrote:
| I don't think most maintainers are opposed to LLM-generated bug
| fixes or solutions _in general_, just the ones that are pure
| slop: Generated end-to-end by a Claude-maxed computer
| enthusiast who thinks that enough green boxes on their GitHub
| profile means they can somehow BS their way into a high-paying
| FAANG software engineer position. (Spoiler: it won't work.)
|
| If I got a PR for one of my projects where the fix was LLM-
| generated, I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand, but I would want
| to see (somehow) that the submitter themselves understood both
| the problem and the solution. Along with all the other usual
| qualifiers (passes tests, follows existing coding style, diff
| doesn't touch more than it has to, etc). There's likely no one
| easy way to tell this, however.
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| > it's such an honor to have your name among the list of
| contributors
|
| I can't help but feel there's something very, very important in
| this line for the future of dev.
| rowanseymour wrote:
| I totally get this and I also think it's now the case that making
| a PR of any significant complexity, for a project you're not a
| maintainer of, isn't necessarily giving that project anything of
| value. That project's maintainers can run the same prompts you
| are running - and if they do, they'll do it with better oversight
| and understanding. If you want to help then maybe's it's more
| useful to just hashout the plan that'll be given to an AI agent
| by a maintainer.
| iamleppert wrote:
| The solution to this problem is for LLMs to get better at
| producing code and descriptions that doesn't look LLM generated.
|
| It's possible to prompt and get this as well, but obviously any
| of the big AI companies that want to increase engagement in their
| coding agent, and want to capture the open source market, should
| come up with a way to allow the LLM to produce unique of, but
| still correct code so that it doesn't look LLM-generated and can
| evade these kinds of checks.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| "For a reviewer, it's demoralizing to communicate with a facade
| of a human."
|
| This is so important. Most humans _like_ communicating with other
| humans. For many (note, I didn 't say all) open source
| collaborators, this is part of the _reward_ of collaborating on
| open source.
|
| Making them communicate with a bot pretending to be a human
| instead removes the reward and makes it feel terrible, like the
| worst job nobody would want. If you spent any time at all
| actually trying to help the contributor underestand and develop
| their skills, you just feel like an idiot. It lowers the patience
| of everyone in the entire endeavor, ruining it for everyone.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| It's probably already too late to put these horses back in the
| barn, but having an "allow AI commits / PRs" would have
| probably been a good idea for GitHub to make available to
| projects. Even better might have been something like a
| robots.txt for repos with rules that could be auto-evaluated
| and PRs auto-rejected if they weren't followed.
|
| Then again, we see how well robots.txt was honored in practice
| over the years. As with everything in late-stage capitalism,
| the humans who showed up with good intentions to legitimately
| help typically did the right things, and those who came to
| extract every last gram of value out of something for their own
| gain ignored the rules with few consequences.
| nohren wrote:
| This is a similar hot issue in academia right now. The ability
| to generate content in papers via llm is much easier than the
| ability to thoughtfully review them. There are now two tracks,
| at least in ICML that I saw, one for AI submitted papers and
| one for non AI submitted papers. And it works the same
| respectively for reviewers. However even for AI submitted
| papers, you cannot have only AI review it. Of course it needs
| human analysis, but still its tricky what you are going to get.
| And they are reviewing whether anonymity can still stand or if
| tying your credibilty to the review process is now necessary.
|
| As for open source PRs, I wonder if for trust's sake you would
| need to self identify the use of AI in your response (All AI,
| some AI, no AI). And there would need to be some sort of AI
| detection algorithm flag your response as % AI. I wonder if
| this would force people to at least translate the LLM responses
| to their own words. It would for sure stop the issue of
| someone's WhatsApp 24/7 claw bot cranking out PR slop. Maybe
| this can lessen the reviewers burden. That being said, more
| thought is needed to distinguish helpful LLM use that enhances
| the objective vs unhelpful slop that places burden on the
| reviewer.
|
| For instance I copy pasted the above to gemini and it produced
| an excellent condensing of my thoughts, "It is now 10x easier
| to generate a "plausible" paper or Pull Request (PR) than it is
| to verify its correctness."
| zenolove wrote:
| Already back in ye olde times, "let me google that for you"
| which I see so often posted on Reddit. Sometimes you just wanna
| exchange with a human, and absorb some of their wisdom, which
| is the whole point of asking a question. Not so different than
| wanting to shop at a butcher you can establish a relationship
| with, rather than a faceless supermarket meat counter.
| lukasgraf wrote:
| The best people I've worked with tended to go out of their way to
| make it as easy for me as possible to critique their ideas or
| implementations.
|
| They spelled out exactly their assumptions, the gaps in their
| knowledge, what they have struggled with during implementation,
| behavior they observed but don't fully understand, etc.
|
| Their default position was that their contribution was not worth
| considering unless they can sell it to the reviewer, by _not_
| assuming their change deserves to get merged because of their
| seniority or authority, but by making the other person understand
| how any why it works. _Especially_ so if the reviewer was their
| junior.
|
| When describing the architecture, they made an effort to
| communicate it so clearly that it became trivial for others to
| spot flaws, and attack their ideas. They not only provided you
| with ammunition to shoot down their ideas, they handed you a
| loaded gun, safety off, and showed you exactly where to point it.
|
| If I see that level of humility and self-introspection in a PR,
| I'm not worried, regardless of whether or not an LLM was
| involved.
|
| But then there's people that created PRs with changes where the
| stack didn't even boot / compile, because of trivial errors. They
| already did that before, and now they've got LLMs. Those are the
| contributions I'm very worried about.
|
| So unlike people in other threads here, I don't agree at all with
| "If the code works, does it matter how it was produced and
| presented?". For me, the meta / out-of-band information about a
| contribution is a _massive_ signal, today more than ever.
| Fomite wrote:
| AI so often doesn't actually increase productivity - it just
| shifts the burden of work from the person creating to the person
| who has to check and evaluate that creation.
|
| In this case, offloading yet more work onto the maintainers of
| the package, because you can't be bothered, but still want
| credit.
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