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indutnyyesterday at 4:02 PM9 repliesview on HN

Taking the question of whether this would be a useful addition to Node.js core or aside, it must be noted that this 19k LoC PR was mostly generated by Claude Code and manually reviewed by the submitter which in my opinion is against the spirit of the project and directly violates the terms of Developer's Certificate of Origin set in the project's CONTRIBUTING.md


Replies

mixologicyesterday at 5:07 PM

Worth noting that mcollina is a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee

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conartist6yesterday at 9:03 PM

Pain is a signal. Even if the trick is not minding, it's still inadvisable to burn your hand on an open flame. The pain is there to help you not get hurt.

I do not think it is wise to brag that your solution to a problem is extremely painful but that you were impervious to all the pain. Others will still feel it. This code takes bandwidth to host and space on devices and for maintainers it permanently doubles the work associated with evolving the filesystem APIs. If someone else comes along with the same kind of thinking they might just double those doubled costs, and someone else might 8x them, all because nobody could feel the pain they were passing on to others

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digikatayesterday at 4:33 PM

Large PRs could follow the practices that the Linux kernel dev lists follow. Sometimes large subsystem changes could be carried separately for a while by the submitter for testing and maintenance before being accepted in theory, reviewed, and if ready, then merged.

While the large code changes were maintained, they were often split up into a set of semantically meaningful commits for purposes of review and maintenance.

With AI blowing up the line counts on PRs, it's a skill set that more developers need to mature. It's good for their own review to take the mass changes, ask themselves how would they want to systematically review it in parts, then split the PR up into meaningful commits: e.g. interfaces, docs, subsets of changed implementations, etc.

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syrusakbaryyesterday at 6:59 PM

Fully disagree with this take. Not allowing AI assistance on PRs will likely decimate the project in the future, as it will not allow fast iteration speeds compared to other alternatives.

Note aside, OpenJS executive director mentioned it's ok to use AI assistance on Node.js contributions:

  I checked with legal and the foundation is fine with the DCO on AI-assisted contributions. We’ll work on getting this documented.

[1]: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/61478#issuecomment-40772...
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athoraxyesterday at 4:17 PM

How exactly does it violate the Developer's Certificate of Origin clause?

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epolanskiyesterday at 4:04 PM

Do as I say, not as I do.

On a more serious note, I think that this will be thoroughly reviewed before it gets merged and Node has an entire security team that overviews these.

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madeofpalkyesterday at 10:34 PM

> it must be noted that this 19k LoC PR was mostly generated by Claude Code and manually reviewed by the submitter

Who reviewed and approved the PR?

petetnttoday at 12:52 AM

Personally I’d like to thank you for raising the point, it seems that tsc members are willing to ram the PR through regardless as per jasnell’s LLM analysis that honestly seems like a hostile gish galloping attempt than an actual honest analysis.