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I wonder whether you have considered the flood of low quality PRs that will clog the inboxes of the unpaid volunteer maintainers of various open source projects

by janoc 3y ago

I wonder whether you have considered the flood of low quality PRs that will clog the inboxes of the unpaid volunteer maintainers of various open source projects now? This has been a big problem already, with people changing a spelling of some comment and submitting a PR in order to have a contributor credit to some project on their CV/university course. So now we automate this and enable it on an even larger scale, with no actual work required beyond typing a prompt into ChatGPT? Please, do provide a way for maintainers to opt out/filter these machine generated PRs before unleashing this on the world. Automating sending PRs to Github projects is really not something I would call sensible or a useful feature, IMO - how often does a legitimate contributor make a PR that this would save them time or benefit them (or the project they are contributing to) in some way? I am maintaining the Wiiuse project on Github and if these automated PRs start showing in my inbox, they are going to be deleted outright. And if there will be too many of them, I will have to close the public contributions to the project completely. I simply don't have resources to deal with such spam. I am not paid for maintaining the project and I am doing it in my free time only. So I need to prioritize bug reports and actual contributions, not low quality AI generated spam.

antonvs 3y ago
People use Github for private projects as well, both personal and corporate. In that case you’d want generated commits to go through PR preview and any automated testing cycle you have. So I don’t think the idea of generated PRs is bad in itself, but you’re right that open source projects would want a way to manage these.
tizkovatereza 3y ago
Hey @janoc, thanks for this point. This is just very simple example project, not meant as a full product to offer people or bigger scale. Of course if the usage happens to increase, we will update the program to prevent the problem you are mentioning. (E.g. limit to private repo, limit the number of PRs etc.) I am very new to coding and wasn't really aware that people are creating PRs just for credit in that extent.

by janoc 3y ago

antonvs 3y ago

People use Github for private projects as well, both personal and corporate. In that case you’d want generated commits to go through PR preview and any automated testing cycle you have. So I don’t think the idea of generated PRs is bad in itself, but you’re right that open source projects would want a way to manage these.

tizkovatereza 3y ago

Hey @janoc, thanks for this point. This is just very simple example project, not meant as a full product to offer people or bigger scale. Of course if the usage happens to increase, we will update the program to prevent the problem you are mentioning. (E.g. limit to private repo, limit the number of PRs etc.) I am very new to coding and wasn't really aware that people are creating PRs just for credit in that extent.