alt Hacker NewsI think Goodhart's law applies really well here. When people make commits for the sake of having made a commit to some famous repo, the "merit" that a commit measures is already useless. Remember Hacktoberfest 2020, before LLMs were popular? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
What merit was there to have anyway. Would the author accept the same changes from a human?? I am inclined to believe they would, I certainly would. Would you have attributed merit to someone just fixing typos? I mean it’s quite helpful. But I wouldn’t think a commit fixing typos ever attributed merit to a developer. So it’s hard to understand the problem with AI doing this. If it was a bot like dependabot but for fixing grammar errors would that be a problem? I assume no, hence the problem is entirely that the human author of the PR is being attributed nonexistent merit by people who should know better.