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Why I'm declining your AI generated MR
- volkk 1y agoMitchell Hashimoto did the same thing with Ghostty and I respect the decision. AI assistance is okay but writing slop with little to no effort to understand it simply to get a badge that you've contributed to OSS is a waste of time for everyone.
- thekevan 1y agoWe get it, some changes to a project are a bad idea. I feel like the overemphasis on AI generated ones is kind of posturing.
- zulban 1y agoI got a MR the other day that should be 40 lines of code but it was 1000. It "mostly" worked. Do I pick apart this slop? Why should I? It's bad for the team and for the project. It's hard to respond to that. I'm genuinely stumped. As I explain in the post, this is me trying to write something re-usable to share with people who do that to a team lead.
- thekevan 1y ago"I got a MR the other day that should be 40 lines of code but it was 1000. It "mostly" worked." I mean just stop there. It isn't a good MR.
- zulban 1y agoI think you're missing the point. If I give a fun extreme example it doesn't mean there's no subtle problem. Where do you draw the line? Maybe I guessed 40 but it would really be 80. Maybe they send in 400 lines. 200? Also 1000 is maybe fine if it's a one shot script that just works one time on non-prod.
- cschep 1y agoLow effort contributions have always, and will ways be, unhelpful. We just now have a tool that generates them EVEN FASTER. :) That must be frustrating for OSS maintainers, especially when contributing them can meaningfully move the needle on getting jobs, clients, etc. Definitely makes sense to have rules in place to help dissuade it, but this brave new world isn't going away.
- gerdesj 1y agoBubble goes pop! I'm old enough to remember the global melt down in 2000ish and 2008. Oh and 1991 in the UK - lol, that's when I graduated. Take your money out of AI and stuff it under the mattress (gold if you are a magpie or blue stocks). I have actually just spent out on a fairly handy GPU to stuff into one of our backup boxes at work. It has gobs of RAM and a fairly useful pair of CPUs and sits idle during the day. AI via LLM is a thing but it isn't worth silly money and I think that a wind of change is on the way.
- Towaway69 1y agoAll these GPUs have to be used for something, if it's not AI then its bitcoin, if its not bitcon it's NFTs, if its not NFTs then its Porn. This is a hardware driven bubble that will mutate into the next big computing hype. Server farms have to be doing something because they cost money. So whatever the next big hype is, big-tech will jump on the bandwagon. Hype it 'til you make it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- DrewADesign 1y ago> All these GPUs have to be used for something They really don’t though. If what they produce becomes less valuable than the electricity it takes to operate the data center they’re housed in, the biggest concern will be figuring out the cheapest way for them to do absolutely nothing.
- r_lee 1y ago
- IshKebab 1y agoAs far as I can tell this is entirely hypothetical and he hasn't actually received an AI generated MRs.
- LtWorf 1y agoI have. Now what?
- flyingspaceship 1y agoReject anything made in bad faith and humor anything in good faith, as is everything
- zulban 1y agoIt can be hard to tell the difference in the workplace sometimes. Especially with juniors.
- esafak 1y agoPrepare a test suite and lint file to ensure some quality control.
- ath3nd 1y agoI have, and I have declined them all. Prompting an LLM and pointing it to somebody else's repo is not helpful, it's distracting and disrespectful, and also delusional to think that it helps the maintainers. For a couple of bucks I can drown my own repos in low quality slop, so I don't need some well wishers to do it for me. As a matter of fact I have yet to see an OSS maintainer that accepts AI generated slop MRs. https://news.itsfoss.com/curl-ai-slop/ https://news.itsfoss.com/curl-ai-slop/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/10/ai_slop_bug_reports/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/10/ai_slop_bug_reports/ https://biggo.com/news/202508220113_Ghostty_Requires_AI_Disclosure_in_Pull_Requests https://biggo.com/news/202508220113_Ghostty_Requires_AI_Disc... If you can't code, don't code and try to contribute to OSS projects. Claude or whatever trash one uses to make this outburst of garbage is not a substitute for skills. Don't waste mainteners' time and attention.
- 1y ago
- tonymet 1y agosounds like the equivalent of people posting on social media that they are getting way too many DMS and dating requests. The coder "humble brag". Just give feedback or decline the PR
- lawlessone 1y agosorry if it's wrong to ask here, I've never joined an OSS project but kinda want to are there many out there that could use the help?
- esafak 1y agoPrepare a pull request to fix bugs from the issue tracker of any library you like. If your pull request gets merged you've joined.
- guappa 1y agoThat is quite bad advice! Most projects have some contributing.md file or something similar with their specific guidelines. One should really start from there. Also a fire and forget merge request is probably the least welcome way to contribute to something.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sky2224 1y agohttps://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners https://github.com/MunGell/awesome-for-beginners This is a repo of good beginner OSS projects to contribute to
- zulban 1y agoAlways fine to ask that question anywhere, in my opinion! Good to note: contributing to code projects also occurs in closed source, big orgs. The same tools are used. My cases for example are from government and our projects usually aren't open source.
- serf 1y ago>How can my feedback improve you as a software developer if you don't understand your own code? Just say that you don't want my code, better yet just silently reject it. I don't want a moral referendum about how my code shall be the mana by which all future reviewers and practitioners of the art shall sup and become enlightened. Group education isn't my job as someone submitting a PR to fix some trivial shit. Sometimes it doesn't need to be smart, sometimes it doesn't need to be a learning experience by which we all grow. Throw out the garbage, keep the good stuff, and appreciate the attention to the project. Be happy that someone wants to help.
- collinmcnulty 1y agoIf you don’t care about the reason for rejection, you don’t have to read it. Many people will ask for a reason and take even more of a maintainer’s time, so writing once and linking helps.
- ath3nd 1y ago> Throw out the garbage, keep the good stuff, and appreciate the attention to the project The garbage in the case of an AI generated PR, is all of it. I will happily reject all of your slop and every future contribution from you if you can't follow the project's contribution guidelines. If you don't like that, that's what forking is for. > Just say that you don't want my code, better yet just silently reject it. Not only I don't want it but I have some ideas what you can do with it and wher this code can go. Also, the code is not yours. I can generate the same amount of garbage as you myself using the same tools, and it will also not be mine, yet I stop myself from doing it, because more garbage is the last thing this world needs. > Be happy that someone wants to help How full you must be of yourself to consider pointing an LLM towards a repo as helping. Must have been very difficult to point Claude towards a repo and trash code goes brrr, something that every person with a pulse can do. And I shudder at the the entitlement to think that OSS maintainers have to thank you for your godly prompt and 0 amount of effort.
- Cheer2171 1y ago> The garbage in the case of an AI generated PR, is all of it. I promise you that you have merged PRs with AI generated code and/or comments. You just couldn't tell because the contributor wasn't a lazy idiot and actually thought about how to use the tools at their disposal to do good work like a professional. I swear if we left things to you people, we'd all still be programming in assembler. Copilot generates most of my commit message drafts now. I end up accepting about half of them without needing any modifications. Sometimes they're shit. That's why I'm the developer and author. I always make sure whatever PR I submit in my name is something I'm proud to stand behind. But sorry that you don't want me on your project for that sin of the tools I chose to use for my work.
- righthand 1y agoIf it’s a low risk site (marketing page), I’ve been blindly approving them so that the engineer can go and fix it when prod breaks. Submit unreviewed garbage, get unreviewed garbage. I am not your quality gate keeper.
- fennec-posix 1y agoOn the flip-side of this, have had friends have their MRs against projects get "reviewed" by CoPilot which does a lot of unnecessary nit-picking and can often be incorrect at it. I get it helps project maintainers save time, but it just feels very dismissive to have your code be thrown to a robot to critique and comment on.
- zulban 1y agoRough. I hope to get automated CR bots in my org working soon. But with 2025 capabilities it should definitely only be brief feedback that people can choose to ignore.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago>which does a lot of unnecessary nit-picking and can often be incorrect at it Like an average style checker.
- elcritch 1y agoFrom the comments I was expecting a less well reasoned post. However, while I don't agree with some of his rationale, generally they seem reasonable. The author isn't even condemning all AI generated MRs. Only ones meeting a few conditions.
- zulban 1y agoMaybe the decent comments hadn't had time to bubble upwards yet. HN is a relatively higher quality online forum but... I still only expect half the commenters to have read the full post. I'm curious to hear what rationale you partly disagree with.
- positron26 1y ago[flagged]
- zulban 1y agoSheesh, that's harsh. Based on a comment that was more constructive than yours I changed it to: > Also called a Pull Request like on GitHub. My org mostly uses GitLab with MRs.
- positron26 1y agoI'm on both sides of the same argument these days, demanding uniformity while pushing the users to understand novelty lol.
- happyopossum 1y ago> Merge Request (MR): when a programmer submits proposed changes to a project in a structured way. This makes it easy for anyone to see the differences and review the changes. Sometimes called a Pull Request. Ok, maybe I’m in a bubble, and my job is only coding-adjacent, but I’ve literally never heard a PR called an MR until today. Is this a new thing?
- nkrisc 1y agoIt’s all I heard in 2011 when I first entered the corporate world.
- kop316 1y agoMerge Request is what Gitlab calls a Pull Request: https://docs.gitlab.com/development/contributing/first_contribution/mr-review/ https://docs.gitlab.com/development/contributing/first_contr... I'm more familiar with that term as I use Gitlab more than Github.
- ares623 1y agoGitlab calls it merge requests
- zulban 1y agoIndeed. I think I'll add a note that PR is GitHub. Not only do I use GitLab more often in my org, but I genuinely think the term itself is more precise. I can be a bit of a stickler for vocabulary.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- blurbleblurble 1y agoThis is a pretty nice document to put in AGENTS.md. Thank you!
- zulban 1y agoI hope so! Feel free to reach out and let me know how it goes ;)
- credit_guy 1y agoI would just create an agent that provides the reviews. Instead of saying "your MR meets some of the criteria I have in this blog post", the agent can point very clearly at the exact criteria and how the merge request meets them, and can even make improvement suggestions. At the end, the author would review the AI generated review, to make sure everything sounds (and is) right. AI can be used in good ways, and bad ways. Show them the good way.
- zulban 1y agoBased on personal use there's no way 2025 capabilities would do a good job of that task. I hope to get automated CR bots in my org working soon but today, it should definitely only be brief feedback that people can choose to ignore.
- nlawalker 1y agoI like this, a couple thoughts on it: 1. I wonder if it would be more effective or land better if it didn’t mention AI at all. You’re not rejecting because of the tools they used, you’re rejecting because it’s a poor request. 2. I’d suggest an addition along the lines of “by the way, since I’m not seeing anything here that would make me think that there might just be some misunderstandings, this request makes me trust you, individually, a little bit less than I did before, and that will be reflected in how I address future requests from you. Happy to chat about it though. Please remember that trust is what makes all of this work.”
- pointlessone 1y agoI wonder why we haven’t seen AI weaponised in the opposite direction yet? Say, a bot with a prmpt like “criticise this PR into oblivion” let loose on AI-generated PRs. The “contributor” is supposed to address the concerns but will they be able to?
- yencabulator 1y agohttps://lennytroll.com/ https://lennytroll.com/ but for PRs
- zulban 1y agoAnd here I was thinking that rejecting a MR and calling it "AI slop" may sometimes be too harsh. Your scheme is diabolical. I love it.
- Lockal 1y agoWhy developers should invest THEIR money? Maybe let vibe coders pay? Look at this - https://github.com/n4si/kubernetes/pull/1 https://github.com/n4si/kubernetes/pull/1 - devin-ai-integration wants to merge 10,000 commits, 5000+ files changed. This is not some random user of Devin AI, this is a part of paid promotional video, demonstrating "a nice PR" (quote from https://youtu.be/OIomeLQmf-4?t=219 https://youtu.be/OIomeLQmf-4?t=219), solving "real life problem" (sic). Now let's say, user pays $$$ according to formula of cognitive load added (both for human and CI). A single PR like this would cost as much as "oops, Netlify just sent me a $100k bill", but this time without a refund.
- pointlessone 1y agoThere are a plenty of free LLMs out there. It doesn’t even have to be particularly smart. It can just infinitely nit pick and ask “why did you do it like this?” on random lines of PR.