I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, but not all cases are created equal. If the PM could create a PR that was clearly verified, like we expect out of all the SWEs, I wouldn’t have a problem.
Multiple companies I know of have internal tool websites that are the front end to the major AI companies and it has access to cut PRs so non devs are able to open PRs
And that is why you felt you needed to boost the narrative and reinforce it so people are fired faster. Totally believable!
Once you get to that point, you can copy paste your issue into an LLM and get a fix close to the PR you would open, but so can the maintainers, so what's the point of opening a PR and adding more friction?
In fact discussing the issue is way more productive since it's just about the actual issue, root cause and tradeoffs without the debates on implementation details and nitpicks.
If you want to contribute major features, you need to befriend, discuss and agree with the maintainers, I don't think drive-by PRs ever worked for this.
My experience is that maintainers cannot do this. Or rather, that it is useless.
At “work”, non-open source, I see maintainers addressing usability issues they never would have touched before. I write the issue, the LLM does the rest.
In fact, last time I included a PR to fix some trivia, the AI said “let’s fix the root issue instead”, and did that. This was astounding to me. That team used to do nothing in the face of complaints / small bug reports. It used to be that without a PR you were ignored.
So what do you think is going on behind the experience with the maintainers? They don’t use AI? Or they are incompetent? Or…?
The fact of being open source means if your contributions are rejected, you simply need to fork. The open market competition will soon determine if your contributions were truly valuable and whether the original project's owner misjudged, or that contribution was essentially worthless.
Being able to market your work and build community are key skills for open source contribution. The history of forges is littered with interesting code that never got enough attention to go anywhere.
No project is obliged to accept your contributions. It's on you to market them, either to the maintainers of the existing project for merging, or to the community through a fork.
It's not a key skill at all, as not everyone is interested in popularity.
Then marketing it to convince others to even try... If the idea is too niche it might never hit that threshold for uptake.
Although that would probably change of the AI-assisted spam shifted over to it.
Another option would be to make a contributor pay for the review of its PR, even a small fee, to deter AI-slop, at least for new contributors. It could/would exclude students or people with the lowest wage though, but I'm optimistic even a 1$ bill or less would be enough.
I agree!
The problem is obviously a resource allocation one. Economics solves problems like that.
To make the system viable, you need something like the free-to-play games use (shudder).
Offer a choice: user’s time and attention or money.
(This addresses the issue of excluding low-resource contributors, which we might care about for equity or because that was us when we were young.)
As an idea on the money front, you could require the contributor to pay for the tokens needed to review their PR! Maybe even let simple models review simple PRs or advanced models decide which model is needed to do the actual review.
I don’t know how the humans can contribute their time and attention effectively, but maybe we can figure that out.
The current contributors are already massively skewed towards people with more ressources and time and 75% of the world, so I do not expect a sharp decrease in contributions.
Yes, proportional to the amount paid.
> and argue with me how to make it better.
No.
Traditionally you've opened to a PR only to get closed for a style/procedural issue or get ghosted. You often didn't fork because maintenance is a hassle. Less so with LLMs, you know?
Nowadays you can just implement your change and vibe-fork it...