alt Hacker NewsIronically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the project".
Automated PR's can have automated responses. You make a human effort, you get a human response.
Replies
I think the idea of leveraging AI to find useless PRs is right.
I didn’t like the second part though where it starts banning people for “bad behavior”.
I get that AI resistance will be a thing in the next few years, but realistically engineers who plan on being around for the next 20-30 years just need to embrace it instead of being sour about it.
Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a whole. People who seek more elevated/finer products can still turn to handcrafted products.
Mass software will be produced by AI, and it will scale just fine.
This is perfect.
Since AI makes it easier for incompetent people to look smart, AI can help us expose those people for what they are.
As a contributor who had to deal with 2 automated reviews in the past month, it's a bad experience. I really wanted to upstream my changes, but these bots made me question if i should at all.
Bots don't understand how their words can hurt people's feelings, and can even less understand that talking to a LLM is even more sad/infuriating for actual humans. I can handle CI/tests just fine, but LLMs playing on my human emotions will have me swearing in no time.
I contribute to free software projects because i want user control over the machine (that was the idea, long before LLMs). Slopware might technically be FLOSS, but it's certainly not in the spirit of FLOSS.
We do similar in Homebrew by autoclosing opens without the issue template (which implies using the API which often now implies AI).
The weird flip side is that the average good AI contribution is better than the average “I used no AI” contribution. Perhaps it’s because Homebrew has so many declarative guardrails and is so easy for agents to test.