> An open pull request represents a commitment from maintainers: that the contribution will be reviewed carefully and considered seriously for inclusion.

This has always been the problem with github culture.

On the Linux and GCC mailing lists, a posted patch does not represent any kind of commitment whatsoever from the maintainers. That's how it should be.

The fact that github puts the number of open PR requests at the very top of every single page related to a project, in an extremely prominent position, is the sort of manipulative "driving engagement" nonsense you'd expect from social media, not serious engineering tools.

The fact that you have to pay github money in order to permanently turn off pull requests or issues (I mean turn off, not automatically close with a bot) is another one of these. BTW codeberg lets any project disable these things.

We've enjoyed a certain period (at least a couple of decades) of global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life, from open-source to journalism and job interviews.

Seems like reading the code is now the real work. AI writes PRs instantly but reviewing them still takes time. Everything flipped. Expect more projects to follow - maintainers can just use ai themselves without needing external contributions.

That's interesting; another project stopped letting users directly open issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319

> With luck, GitHub will soon roll out management features that let us open things back up.

I wouldn't bet on it

SlopHub

Generally speaking, the value of these contributions was determined by "proof of work". Time and effort are precious to a human hence its a somewhat self-regulating system preventing huge amounts of low quality contributions being generated. This is now gone. Isn't that an interesting problem to fix?

Curl project has had this issue https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...

Book publishers have stopped accepting unsolicited submissions for the same reason.

You need a literary agent for just about all of them

> and little to no follow-up engagement from their authors.

A strategy I sometimes use for external contributions is to immediately ask a question about the pull request. Ignoring PRs where I don't get a reply or the reply doesn't make sense potentially eliminates a lot of low quality contributions.

I wonder if a "no AI" rule is an overly blunt instrument. I can sympathise with it but babies and bathwater etc.

This is the inevitable result of probabilistic coding.

The current wave of "AI Coding Agents" are just wrappers around Vector DBs that fetch fuzzy context. They don't "understand" the codebase; they statistically guess the next token based on a cosine similarity match.

Of course they generate subtle bugs. They have no concept of topological consistency.

I realized this 3 months ago and stopped using standard agents. I built a local memory protocol (Remember-Me) that uses Wasserstein Distance to enforce strict consistency before the AI is allowed to write a line of code. If the memory doesn't mathematically fit the context topology, it rejects the edit.

We need to move from "Generative" coding to "Verifiable" coding, or this slop will drown every OSS maintainer.

They invited AI in by creating a comprehensive list of instructions for AI agents - in the README, in a context.md, and even as yarn scripts. What did they expect?

A LinkedIn comment I made on an adjacent topic:

> If the job market is unfavourable to juniors, become senior.

That requires networking with a depth deep enough that other professionals are willing to critique your work.

So... open-source contributions, I guess?

This increases pressure on senior developers who are the current maintainers of open-source packages at the same time that AI is stealing the attention economy that previously rewarded open-source work.

Seems like we need something like blockchain gas on open-source PRs to reduce spam, incentivize open-source maintainers, and enable others to signal their support for suggestions while also putting money where their mouth is.

Didn't take long before the quality went downhill.

Skynet was evil and impressive in The Terminator. Skynet 3.0 in reallife sucks - the AI slop annoys the hell out of me. I now need a browser extension that filters away ALL AI.

At first I aggressively banned anyone that submitted slop to my projects.

Then I just took my hosting private. I can’t be arsed to put in the effort when they don’t.

> <BROWN AND WHITE DRAWING OF AN ASSHOLE> claude added the Task issue type 4 hours ago

is this satire?