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porneltoday at 1:11 PM5 repliesview on HN

I suspect we'll move away from pull requests, because in the LLM world they're the worst way of accepting a contribution.

Verbose slop is painful to review, and it's dangerous to accept unreviewed code from a stranger.

For a maintainer it's way easier to tell their own agent to reimplement the same idea. It's still slop, but done their way, under their supervision.

For popular projects agent-made pull requests become a DoS attack. I wouldn't be surprised if projects start refusing to accept unsolicited PRs and switch to "don't call us, we'll call you". You could have an agent scanning forks of your projects to find what bugs users are fixing and what features they're adding, and use it as a roadmap, without the pressure of accepting any particular commit as-is.

I'd also like to move away from a binary merged-not-merged divide. Projects may have a stable manually-reviewed core that should be protected from agents messing it up, while allowing the sloppy parts to churn however LLMs like it.


Replies

autocollabtoday at 2:34 PM

Take a look at his keynote at WeAreDevelopers..he starts around the 17:20 mark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSoHzgrhk6Q

He does hint around removing away from pull requests!

StilesCrisistoday at 1:51 PM

> For a maintainer it's way easier to tell their own agent to reimplement the same idea.

This only makes sense if you assume the original PR was just vibe-coded with minimal human effort. Maybe one day but I don't think we are there yet.

cryptonymtoday at 1:36 PM

The security implications of scanning and merging external prompts at scale are going to be interesting.

classifiedtoday at 1:19 PM

And it costs at least twice the amount of tokens, so a full win for LLM providers.

jeffbeetoday at 1:58 PM

Provocation: pull requests were always the worst way to do it.