alt Hacker NewsWhat 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.
Well, as I mentioned there was already in 2020 the problem of (human-generated) slop commits causing unnecessary work for maintainers.
The commit in itself might add some minuscule value to the project, but when you take into account the time it takes to check the commit and approve it, you're probably back at negative value again.
Plus, there's the problem of people doing this in an adversarial way. How can you tell whether a random commit touching 100 files is the work of an enthusiastic beginner, or a malicious hacker that's hidden a subtle attack somewhere? Well, you need to spend your time carefully checking it.
So it's way more pragmatic just to set up some automated filter to put all of this stuff in the bin.
Oh and by the way:
> I wouldn’t think a commit fixing typos ever attributed merit to a developer.
The first sentences of the article in question:
> Successful contributions to open source projects are a kind of currency. GitHub in particular encourages this in a number of ways: [...] Potential hiring managers often take note of this. Recruiters often find and screen candidates this way.