Prioritizing or deferring to existing contributors happens in pretty much every human endeavor.

As you point out this of course predates the age of LLM, in many ways it's basic human tribal behavior.

This does have its own set of costs and limitations however. Judgement is hard to measure. Humans create sorting bonds that may optimize for prestige or personal ties over strict qualifications or ability. The tribe is useful, but it can also be ugly. Perhaps in a not too distant future, in some domains or projects these sorts of instincts will be rendered obsolete by projects willing to accept any contribution that satisfies enough constraints, thereby trading human judgement for the desired mix of velocity and safety. Perhaps as the agents themselves improve this tension becomes less an act of external constraint but an internal guide. And what would this be, if not a simulation of judgement itself?

You could also do it in stages, ie have a delegated agent promote people to some purgatory where there is at least some hope of human intervention to attain the same rights and privileges as pre-existing contributors, that is if said agent deems your attempt worthy enough. Or maybe to fight spam an earnest contributor will have to fork over some digital currency, to essentially pay the cost of requesting admission.

All of these scenarios are rather familiar in terms of the history of human social arrangements.

That is just to say, there is no destruction of the social contract here. Only another incremental evolution.

An agent is still attached to an accountable human. If it is not, ignore it.

I forgot to mention why I brought up the idea of who is making the contribution rather than how (i.e., through an LLM).

Right now, the biggest issue open-source maintainers are facing is an ever-increasing supply of PRs. Before coding assistants, those PRs didn't get pushed not because they were never written (although obviously there were fewer in quantity) but because contributors were conscious of how their contributions might be perceived. In many cases, the changes never saw the light of day outside of the fork.

LLMs don't second-guess whether a change is worth submitting, and they certainly don't feel the social pressure of how their contribution might be received. The filter is completely absent.

So I don't think the question is whether machine-generated code is low quality at all, because that is hard to judge, and frankly coding assistants can certainly produce high-quality code (with guidance). The question is who made the contribution. With rising volumes, we will see an increasing amount of rejections.

By the way, we do this too internally. We have a script that deletes LLM-generated PRs automatically after some time. It is just easier and more cost-effective than reviewing the contribution. Also, PRs get rejected for the smallest of reasons.

If it doesn't pass the smell test moments after the link is opened, it get's deleted.

> AI ultimately breaks the social contract

Business schools teach that breaking the social contract is a disruption opportunity for growth, not a negative,

The Hacker in Hacker News refers to "growth hacking" now, not hacking code

Generational churn breaks social contract.

You all using Latin and believing in the old Greek gods to honor the dead?

Muricans still owning slaves from Africa?

All ways in which old social contracts were broken at one point.

We are not VHS cassettes with an obligation to play out a fuzzy memory of history.