alt Hacker News "A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds."
Replies
munificent • today at 3:06 PM
I agree, I suspect what Ladybird is doing here may become the normal social model for open source going forward.
We still need some mechanism for determining which humans have enough long-term commitment to become maintainers. Source contributions are no longer a reliable signal for that, and I don't know what future signal we'll use going forward. That's going to be a hard problem.
But, who knows, if AI really does make programmers radically more productive, maybe successful open source projects don't need a large maintainer team.
jesse_dot_id • today at 3:04 PM
Yeah, that's well written and accurate. Hadn't thought about PR spam in those terms before but that does actually make a lot of sense.
The generalised form of this, which we are rapidly discovering, is that AI breaks the social contract that used to exist between an author and a reader (of prose, code, anything).