Interestingly then, those contributions are also not a measurement of the candidates abilities but mostly of the AI models.

I wonder if hiring adjusts to that but I doubt it. It might only push it even more towards "marketing matters most" instead of actual ability.

>People spamming Open Source repos with AI PRs aren't trying to help Open Source, they're trying to build a brand

I am certain many of them honestly believe that they are doing the right thing and that they are helping. After all hey, they implemented a feature or fixed a bug for the community! It's a grim worldview if you think they are all just selfish.

For now. Give it another half year and "I contribute to open source" will carry the same weight as "I donate to charity" ie nobody cares because any idiot can do it.

I wonder how long it'll take before "I don't use LLMs for coding" carries weight.

A fine example of Goodhart's law: "When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement."

Measuring open source contributions as a way to judge prospective employees used to be a good measurement.

Of course, prospective employees started to not only contribute to OS projects because it was good, but to make sure their contributions were high and noticeable — contributing not for the good of the project but for their own good, and now with amplification of AI 'contributions'.

So, measuring contributions to open source projects is now approximately worthless for evaluating prospective employees.

This is the most uncharitable outlook on the increase of PRs. It may be true for some contributors, but any company reviewing their GitHub will see that the code is largely spam.

I think most AI generated code is people that want to help the project, but maybe aren’t familiar with the standards and norms.