> Unfortunately, the landscape has changed particularly with the advent of AI tools that allow people to trivially create plausible-looking but extremely low-quality contributions with little to no true understanding. Contributors can no longer be trusted based on the minimal barrier to entry to simply submit a change... So, let's move to an explicit trust model where trusted individuals can vouch for others, and those vouched individuals can then contribute.
And per https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md :
> If you aren't vouched, any pull requests you open will be automatically closed. This system exists because open source works on a system of trust, and AI has unfortunately made it so we can no longer trust-by-default because it makes it too trivial to generate plausible-looking but actually low-quality contributions.
===
Looking at the closed PRs of this very project immediately shows https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch/pull/28 - which, true to form, is an AI generated PR that might have been tested and thought through by the submitter, but might not have been! The type of thing that can frustrate maintainers, for sure.
But how do you bootstrap a vouch-list without becoming hostile to new contributors? This seems like a quick way for a project to become insular/isolationist. The idea that projects could scrape/pull each others' vouch-lists just makes that a larger but equally insular community. I've seen well-intentioned prior art in other communities that's become downright toxic from this dynamic.
So, if the goal of this project is to find creative solutions to that problem, shouldn't it avoid dogfooding its own most extreme policy of rejecting PRs out of hand, lest it miss a contribution that suggests a real innovation?
Its just a layer to minimize noise.
Think of this like a spam filter, not a "I met this person live and we signed each other's PGP keys" -level of trust.
It's not there to prevent long-con supply chain attacks by state level actors, it's there to keep Mr Slopinator 9000 from creating thousands of overly verbose useless pull requests on projects.
Thing is, this system isn't supposed to be perfect. It is supposed to be better, while worth the hassle.
I doubt I'll get vouched anywhere (tho IMO it depends on context), but I firmly believe humanity (including me) will benefit from this system. And if you aren't a bad actor with bad intentions, I believe you will, too.
Only side effect is genuine contributors who aren't popular / in the know need to put in a little bit more effort. But again, that is part of worth the hassle. I'll take it for granted.
Well, yea, I guess? That's pretty much how the whole system already works: if you're an attacker who's willing to spend a long time doing helpful beneficial work for projects, you're building a reputation that you can then abuse later until people notice you've gone bad.
This feels a bit https://xkcd.com/810/