Mastodawn

I’ve found myself feeling unmoored by the current crop of FOSS contributions. I genuinely don’t know how to proceed.

Of course there’s the slop where the PR checklist gets deleted & almost all items violated. The truly annoying part about this is that I always try to be kind & not a stickler about policies. I guess I don’t owe kindness to a bot, but it’s a bad look to be assertive in public. (1/5)

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Hynek Schlawack Mar 8

I do not enjoy being a jerk—I want to keep my projects a friendly place that people enjoy to be in because FOSS is about people! Some people appreciate the opportunity of having the license to be assholes but that's not me. The idea of lashing out at someone by mistake horrifies me.

An even more complicated situation is well-intentioned-but-bad-ideas implemented well. There’s no time to think ideas through anymore. (2/5)

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Hynek Schlawack Mar 8

Anyone can tell some LLM to implement their first best idea, but the first thing that comes to mind is rarely the best solution to anything.

LLMs are great to prototype real fast, but dropping a diff hundreds of lines long—no matter how clean the code—on someone’s porch puts them in an uncomfortable position. (3/5)

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Hynek Schlawack Mar 8

I can only reiterate: FOSS is about people. As LLM code improves the first problem will go into the background but the social problems are only gonna get worse. And we've just seen how it works if we try to fix this asymmetry by using LLMs ourselves (spoiler: it's 4k compromised dev machines thru GitHub issue title injection). (4/5)

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Hynek Schlawack Mar 8

I'm not asking for sympathy here because this is not “poor me”; I’m trying to think constructively about it. And I do realize that popular projects had this problem before LLMs took over. It only affects more projects now because huge companies are handing out figurative guns to everyone and acting surprised by the carnage.

I just want to get my pull requests under control without feeling like shit while doing so, man. (5/5)

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Miguel Grinberg

@hynek None of my projects is attrs-level popular, but I have received a fair share of slop PRs too.

This is what I do: I assume any unsolicited PRs that I receive are slop. I spend up to 1 minute reviewing the PR, to see if I change my mind. If I see no clear human signs, then I close it. No comments, no nothing. Just close and move on.

Most people now state that they do not use AI tools in the first sentence of their PRs, which helps a lot. And these people end up being great contributors!