alt Hacker NewsNobody wants to review AI-generated code (unless we are paid for doing so). Open source is fun, that's why people do it for free... adding AI to the mix is just insulting to some, and boring to others.
Like, why on earth would I spent hours reviewing your PR that you/Claude took 5 minutes to write? I couldn't care less if it improves (best case scenario) my open source codebase, I simply don't enjoy the imbalance.
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> Like, why on earth would I spent hours reviewing your PR that you/Claude took 5 minutes to write?
If the PR does what it says it does, why does it actually matter if it took 2 weeks or 2 minutes to put together, given that it's the equivalent level of quality on review?
I get the frustration but I think this take only holds if you assume AI generated code is inherently worse. If someone uses Claude to scaffold the boilerplate and then actually goes through it properly, the end result is the same code you would have written by hand, just faster. The real problem is when people submit 14k lines they clearly did not read through. But that is a review process problem, not an AI problem. Bad PRs existed long before AI.
Why do you care how much effort it took the engineer to make it? If there was a huge amount of tedium that they used Claude Code for, then reviewed and cleaned up so that it’s indistinguishable from whatever you’d expect from a human; what’s it to you?
Not everyone has the same motivations. I’ve done open source for fun, I’ve done it to unblock something at work, I’ve done it to fix something that annoys me.
If your project is gaining useful functionality, that seems like a win.
I hate being paid to review AI slop.
In theory because the code being added is introducing a feature so compelling that it is worth it. In practice, that’s rarely the case.
My personal approach to open source is more or less that when I need a piece of software to exist that does not and there is no good reason to keep it private, it becomes open source. I don’t do it for fun, I do it because I need it and might as well share it. If someone sends me a patch that enhances my use case, I will work with them to incorporate it. If they send me a patch that only benefits them it becomes a calculus of how much effort would it take for me to review it. If the effort is high, my advice is to fork the project or make it easier for me to review. Granted I don’t maintain huge or vital projects, but that’s precisely why: I don’t need yet another programming language or runtime to exist and I wouldn’t want to work on one for fun.