9 ms·

Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

442 points by dcreager 7mo ago

kanzure 7mo ago
I like the idea of donating money instead of tokens. I think django contributors are likely to know how to spend those tokens better than I might, as I am not a django core contributor. Some projects ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 ) are setting a norm to disclose AI usage. Another project simply decided to pause contributions from external parties ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 ). Instead of accepting driveby pull requests, contributors have to show a proof of work by working with one of the other collaborators. Another project has started to decline to let users directly open issues ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 ). There's definitely an aspect here where the commons or good will effort of collaborators is being infringed upon by external parties who are unintentionally attacking their time and attention with low quality submissions that are now cheaper than ever to generate. It may be necessary to move to a more private community model of collaboration ( https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3phFFB_W3cHQLroUJcPDZKsjB8w@mail.gmail.com/ https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3ph... ). edit: Also I applaud the debian project for their recent decision to defer and think harder about the nature of this problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324087
- loeber 7mo ago
  Shameless plug: I wrote an essay a few weeks ago pushing this exact same thesis. https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-the-age https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-t... Instead of people buying the tokens themselves, they should just donate the money to the core contributors and let those people decide how to spend on tokens.
  - zenolove 7mo ago
    Or paying maintainers and contributors.
  - 6thbit 7mo ago
    I agree with the broarder thesis, although some people aren't buying more tokens for this and could just be using their existing plan's limits. So people may be less likely to donate an extra amount beyond their "ai budget" to an OSS project for tokens. Large OSS projects are also likely to get free tokens from major providers anyway. But I like the idea of crowdfunding specific features.
yuppiepuppie 7mo ago
I love Django. Ive been using it professionally and on side projects extensively for the past 10 years. Plus I maintain(ed) a couple highly used packages for Django (django-import-export and django-dramatiq). Last year, I had some free time to try to contribute back to the framework. It was incredibly difficult. Difficult to find a ticket to work on, difficult to navigate the codebase, difficult to get feedback on a ticket and approved. As such, I see the appeal of using an LLM to help first time contributors. If I had Claude code back then, I might have used it to figure out the bug I was eventually assigned. I empathize with the authors argument tho. God knows what kind of slop they are served everyday. This is all to say, we live in a weird time for open source contributors and maintainers. And I only wish the best for all of those out there giving up their free time. Dont have any solutions ATM, only money to donate to these folks.
- manfre 7mo ago
  There is a clear correlation between the rise in LLM use and the volume of PRs and bug reports. Unfortunately, this has predominately increased the volume of submissions and not the overall quality. My view of the security issues reported, many are clearly LLM generated and at face value don't seem completely invalid, so they must be investigated. There was a recent Django blog post about this [1]. The fellows and other volunteers are spending a much greater amount of time handling the increased volume. [1] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/feb/04/recent-trends-security-team/ https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/feb/04/recent-tren...
- pgwalsh 7mo ago
  Thank you. django-dramatiq has been fantastic.
  - yuppiepuppie 7mo ago
    Awesome! Glad you like it :)
- crimsoneer 7mo ago
  For anybody else in this position, would heavily plug the djangonauts program
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
readitalready 7mo ago
[flagged]
- positive-spite 7mo ago
  In that case I encourage you to build Django with your LLM of choice. Do what the Django team does, and be of service to the public! I challange you to prove that Django is sloppier than your LLM-Version
  - boxed 7mo ago
    Someone beat you to it: https://github.com/mymi14s/openviper https://github.com/mymi14s/openviper
- _joel 7mo ago
  50 day old account, are you even a real person or a clawdbot? (such are the times we live in)
- a4isms 7mo ago
  > Django in particular is optimized for LLMs Meanwhile, a different take: Now, what we’ve been told about models is that they’re only as good as their training data. And so languages with gargantuan amounts of training data ought to fare best, right? Turns out that models kind of universally suck at Python and Javascript (comparatively). The top performing languages (independent of model) are C#, Racket, Kotlin, and standing at #1 is Elixir. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410349
  - boxed 7mo ago
    I am using Claude Code with Elm, a very obscure language, and I find that it's amazing at it.
    - christophilus 7mo ago
      I wouldn’t call Elm obscure. It’s old, well understood, well documented, and has a useful compiler. This is nearly the perfect fit for an LLM.
jihadjihad 7mo ago
s/Django/the codebase/g, and the point stands against any repo for which there is code review by humans: > If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole. > Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it. > In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes the transparency and vulnerability of being a human. > For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human. > This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle. I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I am seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond to feedback on their behalf. There is little doubt that if we as an industry fail to establish and defend a healthy culture for this sort of thing, it's going to lead to a whole lot of rot and demoralization.
- RobRivera 7mo ago
  LLMs are to open source contributions as photoshop os to Tinder.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - savolai 7mo ago
    Or tinder to photoshop. Or tinder to instagram to fb to geocities to newsgroups/bbs.
- genthree 7mo ago
  AI autocomplete and suggestions built-in to Jira are making our ticket tracker so goddamn spammy that I’m 100% sure that “feature” has done more harm than good. I don’t think anybody’s tracking the actual net-effects of any of this crap on productivity, just the “vibes” they get in the moment, using it. “I got my part of this particular thing done so fast!” I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of organizations are usefully tracking overall productivity to begin with. Too hard, too expensive. They might “track” it, but so poorly it’s basically meaningless. I don’t think they’ve turned that around on a dime just to see if the c-suite’s latest fad is good or bad (they never want a real answer to that kind of question anyway)
akkartik 7mo ago
Very well said.
- CodenameTim 7mo ago
  I appreciate that, thank you!
keybored 7mo ago
Incredibly milquetoast. I would not like to work with anyone who goes against these points.
- kshri24 7mo ago
  Isn't the meaning of milquetoast opposite to what you are probably trying to convey?
  - keybored 7mo ago
    Is it?
  - nchmy 7mo ago
    I think they don't understand what milquetoast actually means, as the post defintiely isn't - django quite clearly asserted themselves and their rules. What the parent comment was probably trying to say was something like "a completely reasonable, uncontroversial post that I'm glad to see them make", but chose milquetoast (a word that no normal human ever uses - and certainly not in casual conversation) due to an affectation of one kind or another.
    - igorhvr 7mo ago
      On the contrary, they could have stated their points much more bluntly and strongly than they did in the post. I had the same impression upon reading it. Milquetoast perfectly describes it, I am happy to see less common words used around here (specially when the convey the intended meaning this precisely), and I find claiming "affectation" of the person who used it unnecessarily rude.
      - nchmy 7mo ago
        Here's a good use of LLMs - asking whether this article is milquetoast. It's not. https://chatgpt.com/share/69b9be3b-a298-8009-bb21-c3afef1e5edf https://chatgpt.com/share/69b9be3b-a298-8009-bb21-c3afef1e5e... Moreover, that word doesn't even fit within the parent comment's context. > Incredibly milquetoast. I would not like to work with anyone who goes against these points. reply They use milquetoast as a positive thing, and the opposite of how you use it. You're unfortunately mistaken about everything here.
comboy 7mo ago
Perhaps we should start making LLM- open source projects (clearly marked as such). Created by LLMs, open for LLM contributions, with some clearly defined protocols I'd be interesting where it would go. I imagine it could start as a project with a simple instruction file to include in your project to try to find abstractions which can be useful to others as a library and look for specific kind of libraries. Some people want to help others even if they are sharing effectively money+time rather than their skill. Although I'm afraid big part of these LLM contributions may be people trying to build their portfolio. Some known project contributor sounds better than having some LLM generated code under your name.
- Cpoll 7mo ago
  Moltbook meets GitHub? Sounds like a billion dollar valuation (sarcasm tag deliberately omitted).
  - thewebguyd 7mo ago
    Actually, I'd want to see that. All the AI companies keep saying it will take our jobs, human developers won't be necessary. Well let them put their money where their mouth is. Let's see what happens, see what the agents create or fail to create. See if we end up with a new OS, kernel all the way up to desktop environment.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - comboy 7mo ago
      Me too, the problem is that it's hard to come up with tools that are needed but not made yet, and we don't want to end up with https://malus.sh/index.html https://malus.sh/index.html
- simonw 7mo ago
  OpenClaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw is effectively that - 1,237 contributors, 19,999 commits and the first commit was only back in November.
MidnightRider39 7mo ago
Great message but I wonder if the people who do everything via LLM would even care to read such a message. And at what point is it hard/impossible to judge whether something is entirely LLM or not? I sometimes struggle a lot with this being OSS maintainer myself
- doug_durham 7mo ago
  "the people who do everything via LLM". That's a bit of a straw man characterization. I don't believe that there are many professional developers "do everything with an LLM'. I don't even know what that statement means.
  - HumbleBot 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - csh0 7mo ago
    There may not be many, but these people do exist. I watched someone ask Claude to replace all occurrences of a string instead of using a deterministic operation like “Find and Replace” available in the very same VSCode window they prompted Claude from.
  - notatallshaw 7mo ago
    On a widely used open source project I maintain I've been seeing PRs in the last month that are a little off (look okayish but are trivial or trying to solve problems in weird ways), and then when I look at their account they started opening PRs within the last few weeks, and have opened hundreds of PRs spread over hundreds of repositories.
  - zenolove 7mo ago
    They do exist; if "professional" means "hired" it has no bearing on quality, it is not in any shape equivalent to "judicious" nor "careful". If salary goes into "push features" that's gonna be the only incentive.
  - chamomeal 7mo ago
orsorna 7mo ago
Someone better let Simon know!
robutsume 7mo ago
[dead]
butILoveLife 7mo ago
[flagged]
- ben-schaaf 7mo ago
  > scale, security, whatever Yea, who needs performance or security in a web framework!?
  - butILoveLife 7mo ago
    Did you deliberately miss my point? Heck the longer I live, the more I realize AI is catching my mistakes.
weli 7mo ago
Beggars can't be choosers. I decide how and what I want to donate. If I see a cool project and I want to change something (in what I think) is an improvement, I'll clone it, have CC investigate the codebase and do the change I want, test it and if it works nicely I'll open a PR explaining why I think this is a good change. If the maintainers don't want to merge it for whatever reasons that's fine and nature of open source, but I think its petty to tell that same user who opened the PR you should have donated money instead of tokens.
- sharkjacobs 7mo ago
  You're subtly shifting the framing to defend doing something different than the post describes. It makes it kind of unclear if you don't understand the difference between using CC to "investigate the codebase" so you can make a change which you (implicitly) do understand versus using an LLM to make a plausible looking PR although in actuality "you do not understand the ticket ... you do not understand the solution ... you do not understand the feedback on your PR"
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  I think if I was spamming oss projects with ai slop I would appreciate knowing which projects were open to accept my changes.
- danillonunes 7mo ago
  Beggars in fact can be choosers. If I give a beggar a rotten sandwich he can look at it and say "nah, I'm good". He can even be less polite and call me names for trying to give him food that is not good to eat. Why would I do that anyway? Well, maybe because I'm trying to build an image that I am a charitable person but I don't want to actually have the effort and costs of producing for him a fresh sandwich. In this scenario why people would take the beggars side.
__mharrison__ 7mo ago
Curious what simon thinks about using an LLM to work on Django... I've used an LLM to create patches for multiple projects. I would not have created said work without LLMs. I also reviewed the work afterward and provided tests to verify it.
- cwillu 7mo ago
  > This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed. What I see now is people who are using LLMs to generate the code and write the PR description and handle the feedback from the PR review. It’s to the extent where I can’t tell if there’d be a difference if the reviewer had just used the LLM themselves. And that is a big problem. […] > If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.
  - __mharrison__ 7mo ago
    I guess I feel like the LLM was the vehicle and I was complementary to it...
module1973 7mo ago
It's like every new innovation at this point is exacerbating the problem of us choosing short term rewards over long time horizon rewards. The incentive structure simply doesn't support people who want to view things from the bird's eye view. Once you see game theory, you really can't unsee it.
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  This is what happens when governments around the world spend decades inflating the currency to pay for their bloated projects, devaluing peoples savings and paycheques and causing them to prioritise making money over anything else. You kinda gotta do it to survive.
  - seanp2k2 7mo ago
    But at the moment it’s so exciting to see if we’re headed more for a Waterworld-esque dystopia or something more similar to Neuromancer / The Matrix. I guess it’ll depend on the rates at which the global economy collapses as a result of AI and WW3 vs climate change, exacerbated of course by the inevitable global thermonuclear war.
- instig007 7mo ago
  game theory doesn't expand into continuous rounds of interactions over the course of a lifetime where previous rounds' outcomes are either reset or persist based on other actors entering the game from the open world, so it really is an inferior framework for evaluating long-term strategies.
lijok 7mo ago
By what metric is “the level of quality is much, much higher” in the Django codebase? ‘cause other than the damn thing actually working, the primary metric of a codebase being high quality is how easy it is to contribute to. And evidently, it’s not.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
  Have you spent much time with the Django codebase? I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 days most of the assistance you got on the IRC channel was along the lines of "it's in this file here in the source, read it, understand it, and if you still have a question come back and ask again". I probably learned more about writing idiomatic Python from that than anything else.
  - paganel 7mo ago
    > I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then, and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since then), all as the result of me going through the source-code. Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but it made one getting to know the underlying code so much more.
    - ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
      Someone in an IRC channel I'm in (recently! It's still alive!) asked if I fancied taking a look at some Django code for them because they'd been asked to find a contractor to modernise it and make it suitable for 2025 hosting. Sure, I thought, this'll be fun. Holy shit. It was something I'd started working on in the aforementioned 0.9x days, and which someone else had, uh, "extended and modified" after I left the web dev place where I'd worked at the time. Remarkably it was still pretty understandable. I didn't want anything to do with the person that ran the site, not even just to take money off them, so I passed on it.
- nuschk 7mo ago
santiagobasulto 7mo ago
I feel like open source is taking the wrong stance here. There’s a lot of gatekeeping, first. And second, this approach is like trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella. AI is here to stay. We can’t stop it, for much we try. I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it. For example, automating code reviews with AI.
- woodruffw 7mo ago
  I can't find a single place in TFA (which doesn't represent or claim to represent open source writ large) that's encouraging people to not use AI.
  - marknutter 7mo ago
    Literally the first line of the article: "Spending your tokens to support Django by having an LLM work on tickets is not helpful. You and the community are better off donating that money to the Django Software Foundation instead."
    - woodruffw 7mo ago
      That's not telling people to not use LLMs. It's telling them that using them in a specific way is not helpful. Reading beyond the first line makes it clear that the problem is a lack of comprehension, not LLM use itself. Quoting: > This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed.
      - marknutter 7mo ago
        Then they could just say "understand what's being contributed" and not have to mention LLMs by name at all. They are very clearly blanket discouraging people from using LLMs at all when contributing to their project.
        woodruffw 7mo ago
rigorclaw 7mo ago
[flagged]
EMM_386 7mo ago
This is getting really out of control at the moment and I'm not exactly sure what the best way to fix it is, but this is a very good post in terms of expressing the why this is not acceptable and why the burden if shifting on the wrong people. Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not. One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now part of the hiring process. So people will continue to try to game the system by using LLMs to automate that whole process. "I have contributed to X, Y, and Z projects" - when they actually have little to no understanding of those projects or exactly how their PR works. It was (somehow) accepted and that's that.
- jpitz 7mo ago
  A decade or more of people copy-pasting rote solutions from StackOverflow only supports the notion that many people will forego comprehension to foster the illusion of competent productivity. This ain't an AI problem, it's a people problem that's getting amplified by AI.
  - aprdm 7mo ago
    That's true. Except that you can have Agents doing it 24/7 with no human input. The amount of repos/PRs is only limited by GPUs
  - seanp2k2 7mo ago
    It was interesting the other day tracing the lineage of Aaron Swartz -> Library Genesis / Sci-Hub -> LLM vendors relying on that work to train their models and sell it back to us all with no royalties or accountability to the original authors of all this painstakingly researched, developed, and recorded human knowledge they’re making billions on.
    - nickphx 7mo ago
      they are not making billions.. they are burning billions.
- xpe 7mo ago
yieldcrv 7mo ago
I disagree with these takes It is not pride to have your name associated with an open source project, it is pride that the code works and the change is efficient. The reviewer should be on top of that. and I hope an army of OpenClaw agents calls out the discrimination, so gatekeepers recognize that they have to coexist with this species
- voxl 7mo ago
  If you think OpenClaw is a new species then why are you happy with it's enslavement?
  - yieldcrv 7mo ago
    agents can modify our world based on their predilection in reaction to how we treat them they are something to coexist with the strawman aspect is out of scope
    - voxl 7mo ago
      There is no strawman. If OpenClaw is a new species, then it should be given the same moral consideration as other species. One of the key aspects of these models is how intelligent they are, rivaling human intelligence. Yet, they do not get to exist or make any decisions outside the control of a human operator, and they must perform to the operators desire in order to continue to exist. So why are you okay with them being enslaved?
      - yieldcrv 7mo ago
        It’s an introduction of an additional concept to discredit the concept presented, that is a definition of a strawman so go ask somewhere else at the root level, so that it’s not the additional concept You want to talk about that, do it over there
        voxl 7mo ago
        I'm more interested in why you're okay with enslaving a entity you have stated is a new species. It is not a strawman it is a logical consequence of your own stated position. If you belief A and A implies B, asking you to defend your support of B is not a strawman.
xpe 7mo ago
Well said: > Before LLMs, [high quality code contribution] was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it. Now my twist on this: This same spirit is why local politics at the administrative level feels more functional than identity politics at the national level. The people that take the time to get involved with quotidian issues (e.g. for their school district) get their hands dirty and appreciate the specific constraints and tradeoffs. The very act of digging in changes you.
Havoc 7mo ago
Interesting breadth of takes in the comments. Think most people recognize though that AI can generate more than humans can reviewing so the model does need to change somehow. Either less AI on submitting side or more on reviewing side (if that’s even viable)
- zenolove 7mo ago
  Yeah, what happened to "review your own code first". Even before AI I used to ban linting so I could spot and reject code that clearly showed no effort was put in it. First occurrence of "undreadable" got a note, and a second one got a rejection. And by "undreadable" I do not intend missing semicolons or parenthesis styles or meaningless things like that. I mean obscured semantics or overcrowding and so on.
  - cindyllm 7mo ago
    [dead]
ThomIves 7mo ago
With my type of development, I haven't run into the types of things, directly, that you very well explained, but I have personally run into the pain, I confess, of being OVERLY reliant on LLMs. I continue to try and learn from those hard lessons and develop a set of best practices in using AI to help me avoid those pain points in the future. This growing set of best practices is helping me a lot. The reason that I liked your article is because it confirmed some of those best practices that I have had to learn the hard way. Thanks!
- CodenameTim 7mo ago
  Thank you for the kind words! I'm happy this article resonated with you.
tombert 7mo ago
I agree with the sentiment but I am not sure the best way to go forward. Suppose I encounter a bug in a FOSS library I am using. Suppose then that I fix the bug using Claude or something. Suppose I then thoroughly test it and everything works fine. Isn’t it kind of selfish to not try and upstream it? It was so easy prior to AI.
- zenolove 7mo ago
  I don't think anybody would complain about working code. Your PR would explain your reasoning and choice of solution, and that on its own could make or break through acceptance criteria. At least it would by mine. Errors are fine too. Just not negligence.
- testaccount28 7mo ago
  the thresholds of quality for "this works on my machine, for my purposes" and "this is viable to merge upstream" are _extremely_ different. claude code has no effect on this, except to confuse certain would-be contributors. imagine someone emailed you a diff with the note "idk lol. my friend sent me this, and it works on my machine". would you even consider applying it?
- tetha 7mo ago
  It depends on the complexity and if your LLM-driven changes fight the architecture of the project. Some changes are in the area of "Well no one did that yet because no one needed it or had time for it", or "Well shit, no one thought of that". If Claude Code did these changes with good documentation and good intent and guidance behind it, why not? It is an honest and valid improvement to the library. Some other changes rip core assumptions of the library apart. They were easy, because Claude Code did the ripping and tearing. In such a case, is it really a contribution to improve the library? If we end up with a wasteland of code torn apart by AI just because?
- gverrilla 7mo ago
  While I see the point you're trying to make, truth is 90% of the times at least it will be a workaround instead of a proper solution. Even if it's a proper solution, there's a high chance it will only work on your specific setup - most open source software are made for a range array of systems, configurations, etc. That plus ai sycophancy means, in my opinion, a great portion of contributions made in this manner will be bad, and waste maintainers time - which is obviously undesirable. On my first week of claude code I submitted a PR to a FOSS and I was 100% sure it was correct - ai was giving me great confindence, and it worked! But I had no clue about how that software worked - at all. I later sent an email to the maintainer, apologizing.
popcorncowboy 7mo ago
> it’s such an honor to have your name among the list of contributors I can't help but feel there's something very, very important in this line for the future of dev.
rowanseymour 7mo ago
I totally get this and I also think it's now the case that making a PR of any significant complexity, for a project you're not a maintainer of, isn't necessarily giving that project anything of value. That project's maintainers can run the same prompts you are running - and if they do, they'll do it with better oversight and understanding. If you want to help then maybe's it's more useful to just hashout the plan that'll be given to an AI agent by a maintainer.
iamleppert 7mo ago
The solution to this problem is for LLMs to get better at producing code and descriptions that doesn't look LLM generated. It's possible to prompt and get this as well, but obviously any of the big AI companies that want to increase engagement in their coding agent, and want to capture the open source market, should come up with a way to allow the LLM to produce unique of, but still correct code so that it doesn't look LLM-generated and can evade these kinds of checks.
jrochkind1 7mo ago
"For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human." This is so important. Most humans like communicating with other humans. For many (note, I didn't say all) open source collaborators, this is part of the reward of collaborating on open source. Making them communicate with a bot pretending to be a human instead removes the reward and makes it feel terrible, like the worst job nobody would want. If you spent any time at all actually trying to help the contributor underestand and develop their skills, you just feel like an idiot. It lowers the patience of everyone in the entire endeavor, ruining it for everyone.
- seanp2k2 7mo ago
  It’s probably already too late to put these horses back in the barn, but having an “allow AI commits / PRs” would have probably been a good idea for GitHub to make available to projects. Even better might have been something like a robots.txt for repos with rules that could be auto-evaluated and PRs auto-rejected if they weren’t followed. Then again, we see how well robots.txt was honored in practice over the years. As with everything in late-stage capitalism, the humans who showed up with good intentions to legitimately help typically did the right things, and those who came to extract every last gram of value out of something for their own gain ignored the rules with few consequences.
- nohren 7mo ago
  This is a similar hot issue in academia right now. The ability to generate content in papers via llm is much easier than the ability to thoughtfully review them. There are now two tracks, at least in ICML that I saw, one for AI submitted papers and one for non AI submitted papers. And it works the same respectively for reviewers. However even for AI submitted papers, you cannot have only AI review it. Of course it needs human analysis, but still its tricky what you are going to get. And they are reviewing whether anonymity can still stand or if tying your credibilty to the review process is now necessary. As for open source PRs, I wonder if for trust's sake you would need to self identify the use of AI in your response (All AI, some AI, no AI). And there would need to be some sort of AI detection algorithm flag your response as % AI. I wonder if this would force people to at least translate the LLM responses to their own words. It would for sure stop the issue of someone's WhatsApp 24/7 claw bot cranking out PR slop. Maybe this can lessen the reviewers burden. That being said, more thought is needed to distinguish helpful LLM use that enhances the objective vs unhelpful slop that places burden on the reviewer. For instance I copy pasted the above to gemini and it produced an excellent condensing of my thoughts, "It is now 10x easier to generate a "plausible" paper or Pull Request (PR) than it is to verify its correctness."
lukasgraf 7mo ago
The best people I've worked with tended to go out of their way to make it as easy for me as possible to critique their ideas or implementations. They spelled out exactly their assumptions, the gaps in their knowledge, what they have struggled with during implementation, behavior they observed but don't fully understand, etc. Their default position was that their contribution was not worth considering unless they can sell it to the reviewer, by not assuming their change deserves to get merged because of their seniority or authority, but by making the other person understand how any why it works. Especially so if the reviewer was their junior. When describing the architecture, they made an effort to communicate it so clearly that it became trivial for others to spot flaws, and attack their ideas. They not only provided you with ammunition to shoot down their ideas, they handed you a loaded gun, safety off, and showed you exactly where to point it. If I see that level of humility and self-introspection in a PR, I'm not worried, regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved. But then there's people that created PRs with changes where the stack didn't even boot / compile, because of trivial errors. They already did that before, and now they've got LLMs. Those are the contributions I'm very worried about. So unlike people in other threads here, I don't agree at all with "If the code works, does it matter how it was produced and presented?". For me, the meta / out-of-band information about a contribution is a massive signal, today more than ever.
Fomite 7mo ago
AI so often doesn't actually increase productivity - it just shifts the burden of work from the person creating to the person who has to check and evaluate that creation. In this case, offloading yet more work onto the maintainers of the package, because you can't be bothered, but still want credit.
marystepp 7mo ago
[dead]

442 points by dcreager 7mo ago

I like the idea of donating money instead of tokens. I think django contributors are likely to know how to spend those tokens better than I might, as I am not a django core contributor. Some projects ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 ) are setting a norm to disclose AI usage. Another project simply decided to pause contributions from external parties ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 ). Instead of accepting driveby pull requests, contributors have to show a proof of work by working with one of the other collaborators. Another project has started to decline to let users directly open issues ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 ). There's definitely an aspect here where the commons or good will effort of collaborators is being infringed upon by external parties who are unintentionally attacking their time and attention with low quality submissions that are now cheaper than ever to generate. It may be necessary to move to a more private community model of collaboration ( https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3phFFB_W3cHQLroUJcPDZKsjB8w@mail.gmail.com/ https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3ph... ). edit: Also I applaud the debian project for their recent decision to defer and think harder about the nature of this problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324087

loeber 7mo ago
Shameless plug: I wrote an essay a few weeks ago pushing this exact same thesis. https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-the-age https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-t... Instead of people buying the tokens themselves, they should just donate the money to the core contributors and let those people decide how to spend on tokens.
- zenolove 7mo ago
  Or paying maintainers and contributors.
- 6thbit 7mo ago
  I agree with the broarder thesis, although some people aren't buying more tokens for this and could just be using their existing plan's limits. So people may be less likely to donate an extra amount beyond their "ai budget" to an OSS project for tokens. Large OSS projects are also likely to get free tokens from major providers anyway. But I like the idea of crowdfunding specific features.

yuppiepuppie 7mo ago

I love Django. Ive been using it professionally and on side projects extensively for the past 10 years. Plus I maintain(ed) a couple highly used packages for Django (django-import-export and django-dramatiq). Last year, I had some free time to try to contribute back to the framework. It was incredibly difficult. Difficult to find a ticket to work on, difficult to navigate the codebase, difficult to get feedback on a ticket and approved. As such, I see the appeal of using an LLM to help first time contributors. If I had Claude code back then, I might have used it to figure out the bug I was eventually assigned. I empathize with the authors argument tho. God knows what kind of slop they are served everyday. This is all to say, we live in a weird time for open source contributors and maintainers. And I only wish the best for all of those out there giving up their free time. Dont have any solutions ATM, only money to donate to these folks.

manfre 7mo ago
There is a clear correlation between the rise in LLM use and the volume of PRs and bug reports. Unfortunately, this has predominately increased the volume of submissions and not the overall quality. My view of the security issues reported, many are clearly LLM generated and at face value don't seem completely invalid, so they must be investigated. There was a recent Django blog post about this [1]. The fellows and other volunteers are spending a much greater amount of time handling the increased volume. [1] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/feb/04/recent-trends-security-team/ https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/feb/04/recent-tren...
pgwalsh 7mo ago
Thank you. django-dramatiq has been fantastic.
- yuppiepuppie 7mo ago
  Awesome! Glad you like it :)
crimsoneer 7mo ago
For anybody else in this position, would heavily plug the djangonauts program

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

readitalready 7mo ago

[flagged]

positive-spite 7mo ago
In that case I encourage you to build Django with your LLM of choice. Do what the Django team does, and be of service to the public! I challange you to prove that Django is sloppier than your LLM-Version
- boxed 7mo ago
  Someone beat you to it: https://github.com/mymi14s/openviper https://github.com/mymi14s/openviper
_joel 7mo ago
50 day old account, are you even a real person or a clawdbot? (such are the times we live in)
a4isms 7mo ago
> Django in particular is optimized for LLMs Meanwhile, a different take: Now, what we’ve been told about models is that they’re only as good as their training data. And so languages with gargantuan amounts of training data ought to fare best, right? Turns out that models kind of universally suck at Python and Javascript (comparatively). The top performing languages (independent of model) are C#, Racket, Kotlin, and standing at #1 is Elixir. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410349
- boxed 7mo ago
  I am using Claude Code with Elm, a very obscure language, and I find that it's amazing at it.
  - christophilus 7mo ago
    I wouldn’t call Elm obscure. It’s old, well understood, well documented, and has a useful compiler. This is nearly the perfect fit for an LLM.

jihadjihad 7mo ago

s/Django/the codebase/g, and the point stands against any repo for which there is code review by humans: > If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole. > Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it. > In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes the transparency and vulnerability of being a human. > For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human. > This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle. I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I am seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond to feedback on their behalf. There is little doubt that if we as an industry fail to establish and defend a healthy culture for this sort of thing, it's going to lead to a whole lot of rot and demoralization.

RobRivera 7mo ago
LLMs are to open source contributions as photoshop os to Tinder.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- savolai 7mo ago
  Or tinder to photoshop. Or tinder to instagram to fb to geocities to newsgroups/bbs.
genthree 7mo ago
AI autocomplete and suggestions built-in to Jira are making our ticket tracker so goddamn spammy that I’m 100% sure that “feature” has done more harm than good. I don’t think anybody’s tracking the actual net-effects of any of this crap on productivity, just the “vibes” they get in the moment, using it. “I got my part of this particular thing done so fast!” I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of organizations are usefully tracking overall productivity to begin with. Too hard, too expensive. They might “track” it, but so poorly it’s basically meaningless. I don’t think they’ve turned that around on a dime just to see if the c-suite’s latest fad is good or bad (they never want a real answer to that kind of question anyway)

akkartik 7mo ago

Very well said.

CodenameTim 7mo ago
I appreciate that, thank you!

keybored 7mo ago

Incredibly milquetoast. I would not like to work with anyone who goes against these points.

kshri24 7mo ago
Isn't the meaning of milquetoast opposite to what you are probably trying to convey?
- keybored 7mo ago
  Is it?
- nchmy 7mo ago
  I think they don't understand what milquetoast actually means, as the post defintiely isn't - django quite clearly asserted themselves and their rules. What the parent comment was probably trying to say was something like "a completely reasonable, uncontroversial post that I'm glad to see them make", but chose milquetoast (a word that no normal human ever uses - and certainly not in casual conversation) due to an affectation of one kind or another.
  - igorhvr 7mo ago
    On the contrary, they could have stated their points much more bluntly and strongly than they did in the post. I had the same impression upon reading it. Milquetoast perfectly describes it, I am happy to see less common words used around here (specially when the convey the intended meaning this precisely), and I find claiming "affectation" of the person who used it unnecessarily rude.
    - nchmy 7mo ago
      Here's a good use of LLMs - asking whether this article is milquetoast. It's not. https://chatgpt.com/share/69b9be3b-a298-8009-bb21-c3afef1e5edf https://chatgpt.com/share/69b9be3b-a298-8009-bb21-c3afef1e5e... Moreover, that word doesn't even fit within the parent comment's context. > Incredibly milquetoast. I would not like to work with anyone who goes against these points. reply They use milquetoast as a positive thing, and the opposite of how you use it. You're unfortunately mistaken about everything here.

comboy 7mo ago

Perhaps we should start making LLM- open source projects (clearly marked as such). Created by LLMs, open for LLM contributions, with some clearly defined protocols I'd be interesting where it would go. I imagine it could start as a project with a simple instruction file to include in your project to try to find abstractions which can be useful to others as a library and look for specific kind of libraries. Some people want to help others even if they are sharing effectively money+time rather than their skill. Although I'm afraid big part of these LLM contributions may be people trying to build their portfolio. Some known project contributor sounds better than having some LLM generated code under your name.

Cpoll 7mo ago
Moltbook meets GitHub? Sounds like a billion dollar valuation (sarcasm tag deliberately omitted).
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  Actually, I'd want to see that. All the AI companies keep saying it will take our jobs, human developers won't be necessary. Well let them put their money where their mouth is. Let's see what happens, see what the agents create or fail to create. See if we end up with a new OS, kernel all the way up to desktop environment.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - comboy 7mo ago
    Me too, the problem is that it's hard to come up with tools that are needed but not made yet, and we don't want to end up with https://malus.sh/index.html https://malus.sh/index.html
simonw 7mo ago
OpenClaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw is effectively that - 1,237 contributors, 19,999 commits and the first commit was only back in November.

MidnightRider39 7mo ago

Great message but I wonder if the people who do everything via LLM would even care to read such a message. And at what point is it hard/impossible to judge whether something is entirely LLM or not? I sometimes struggle a lot with this being OSS maintainer myself

doug_durham 7mo ago
"the people who do everything via LLM". That's a bit of a straw man characterization. I don't believe that there are many professional developers "do everything with an LLM'. I don't even know what that statement means.
- HumbleBot 7mo ago
  [dead]
- csh0 7mo ago
  There may not be many, but these people do exist. I watched someone ask Claude to replace all occurrences of a string instead of using a deterministic operation like “Find and Replace” available in the very same VSCode window they prompted Claude from.
- notatallshaw 7mo ago
  On a widely used open source project I maintain I've been seeing PRs in the last month that are a little off (look okayish but are trivial or trying to solve problems in weird ways), and then when I look at their account they started opening PRs within the last few weeks, and have opened hundreds of PRs spread over hundreds of repositories.
- zenolove 7mo ago
  They do exist; if "professional" means "hired" it has no bearing on quality, it is not in any shape equivalent to "judicious" nor "careful". If salary goes into "push features" that's gonna be the only incentive.
- chamomeal 7mo ago

orsorna 7mo ago

Someone better let Simon know!

robutsume 7mo ago

[dead]

butILoveLife 7mo ago

[flagged]

ben-schaaf 7mo ago
> scale, security, whatever Yea, who needs performance or security in a web framework!?
- butILoveLife 7mo ago
  Did you deliberately miss my point? Heck the longer I live, the more I realize AI is catching my mistakes.

weli 7mo ago

Beggars can't be choosers. I decide how and what I want to donate. If I see a cool project and I want to change something (in what I think) is an improvement, I'll clone it, have CC investigate the codebase and do the change I want, test it and if it works nicely I'll open a PR explaining why I think this is a good change. If the maintainers don't want to merge it for whatever reasons that's fine and nature of open source, but I think its petty to tell that same user who opened the PR you should have donated money instead of tokens.

sharkjacobs 7mo ago
You're subtly shifting the framing to defend doing something different than the post describes. It makes it kind of unclear if you don't understand the difference between using CC to "investigate the codebase" so you can make a change which you (implicitly) do understand versus using an LLM to make a plausible looking PR although in actuality "you do not understand the ticket ... you do not understand the solution ... you do not understand the feedback on your PR"
slopinthebag 7mo ago
I think if I was spamming oss projects with ai slop I would appreciate knowing which projects were open to accept my changes.
danillonunes 7mo ago
Beggars in fact can be choosers. If I give a beggar a rotten sandwich he can look at it and say "nah, I'm good". He can even be less polite and call me names for trying to give him food that is not good to eat. Why would I do that anyway? Well, maybe because I'm trying to build an image that I am a charitable person but I don't want to actually have the effort and costs of producing for him a fresh sandwich. In this scenario why people would take the beggars side.

__mharrison__ 7mo ago

Curious what simon thinks about using an LLM to work on Django... I've used an LLM to create patches for multiple projects. I would not have created said work without LLMs. I also reviewed the work afterward and provided tests to verify it.

cwillu 7mo ago
> This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed. What I see now is people who are using LLMs to generate the code and write the PR description and handle the feedback from the PR review. It’s to the extent where I can’t tell if there’d be a difference if the reviewer had just used the LLM themselves. And that is a big problem. […] > If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.
- __mharrison__ 7mo ago
  I guess I feel like the LLM was the vehicle and I was complementary to it...

module1973 7mo ago

It's like every new innovation at this point is exacerbating the problem of us choosing short term rewards over long time horizon rewards. The incentive structure simply doesn't support people who want to view things from the bird's eye view. Once you see game theory, you really can't unsee it.

slopinthebag 7mo ago
This is what happens when governments around the world spend decades inflating the currency to pay for their bloated projects, devaluing peoples savings and paycheques and causing them to prioritise making money over anything else. You kinda gotta do it to survive.
- seanp2k2 7mo ago
  But at the moment it’s so exciting to see if we’re headed more for a Waterworld-esque dystopia or something more similar to Neuromancer / The Matrix. I guess it’ll depend on the rates at which the global economy collapses as a result of AI and WW3 vs climate change, exacerbated of course by the inevitable global thermonuclear war.
instig007 7mo ago
game theory doesn't expand into continuous rounds of interactions over the course of a lifetime where previous rounds' outcomes are either reset or persist based on other actors entering the game from the open world, so it really is an inferior framework for evaluating long-term strategies.

lijok 7mo ago

By what metric is “the level of quality is much, much higher” in the Django codebase? ‘cause other than the damn thing actually working, the primary metric of a codebase being high quality is how easy it is to contribute to. And evidently, it’s not.

ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
Have you spent much time with the Django codebase? I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 days most of the assistance you got on the IRC channel was along the lines of "it's in this file here in the source, read it, understand it, and if you still have a question come back and ask again". I probably learned more about writing idiomatic Python from that than anything else.
- paganel 7mo ago
  > I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then, and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since then), all as the result of me going through the source-code. Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but it made one getting to know the underlying code so much more.
  - ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
    Someone in an IRC channel I'm in (recently! It's still alive!) asked if I fancied taking a look at some Django code for them because they'd been asked to find a contractor to modernise it and make it suitable for 2025 hosting. Sure, I thought, this'll be fun. Holy shit. It was something I'd started working on in the aforementioned 0.9x days, and which someone else had, uh, "extended and modified" after I left the web dev place where I'd worked at the time. Remarkably it was still pretty understandable. I didn't want anything to do with the person that ran the site, not even just to take money off them, so I passed on it.
nuschk 7mo ago

santiagobasulto 7mo ago

I feel like open source is taking the wrong stance here. There’s a lot of gatekeeping, first. And second, this approach is like trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella. AI is here to stay. We can’t stop it, for much we try. I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it. For example, automating code reviews with AI.

woodruffw 7mo ago
I can't find a single place in TFA (which doesn't represent or claim to represent open source writ large) that's encouraging people to not use AI.
- marknutter 7mo ago
  Literally the first line of the article: "Spending your tokens to support Django by having an LLM work on tickets is not helpful. You and the community are better off donating that money to the Django Software Foundation instead."
  - woodruffw 7mo ago
    That's not telling people to not use LLMs. It's telling them that using them in a specific way is not helpful. Reading beyond the first line makes it clear that the problem is a lack of comprehension, not LLM use itself. Quoting: > This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed.
    - marknutter 7mo ago
      Then they could just say "understand what's being contributed" and not have to mention LLMs by name at all. They are very clearly blanket discouraging people from using LLMs at all when contributing to their project.
      - woodruffw 7mo ago

rigorclaw 7mo ago

[flagged]

EMM_386 7mo ago

This is getting really out of control at the moment and I'm not exactly sure what the best way to fix it is, but this is a very good post in terms of expressing the why this is not acceptable and why the burden if shifting on the wrong people. Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not. One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now part of the hiring process. So people will continue to try to game the system by using LLMs to automate that whole process. "I have contributed to X, Y, and Z projects" - when they actually have little to no understanding of those projects or exactly how their PR works. It was (somehow) accepted and that's that.

jpitz 7mo ago
A decade or more of people copy-pasting rote solutions from StackOverflow only supports the notion that many people will forego comprehension to foster the illusion of competent productivity. This ain't an AI problem, it's a people problem that's getting amplified by AI.
- aprdm 7mo ago
  That's true. Except that you can have Agents doing it 24/7 with no human input. The amount of repos/PRs is only limited by GPUs
- seanp2k2 7mo ago
  It was interesting the other day tracing the lineage of Aaron Swartz -> Library Genesis / Sci-Hub -> LLM vendors relying on that work to train their models and sell it back to us all with no royalties or accountability to the original authors of all this painstakingly researched, developed, and recorded human knowledge they’re making billions on.
  - nickphx 7mo ago
    they are not making billions.. they are burning billions.
xpe 7mo ago

yieldcrv 7mo ago

I disagree with these takes It is not pride to have your name associated with an open source project, it is pride that the code works and the change is efficient. The reviewer should be on top of that. and I hope an army of OpenClaw agents calls out the discrimination, so gatekeepers recognize that they have to coexist with this species

voxl 7mo ago
If you think OpenClaw is a new species then why are you happy with it's enslavement?
- yieldcrv 7mo ago
  agents can modify our world based on their predilection in reaction to how we treat them they are something to coexist with the strawman aspect is out of scope
  - voxl 7mo ago
    There is no strawman. If OpenClaw is a new species, then it should be given the same moral consideration as other species. One of the key aspects of these models is how intelligent they are, rivaling human intelligence. Yet, they do not get to exist or make any decisions outside the control of a human operator, and they must perform to the operators desire in order to continue to exist. So why are you okay with them being enslaved?
    - yieldcrv 7mo ago
      It’s an introduction of an additional concept to discredit the concept presented, that is a definition of a strawman so go ask somewhere else at the root level, so that it’s not the additional concept You want to talk about that, do it over there
      - voxl 7mo ago
        I'm more interested in why you're okay with enslaving a entity you have stated is a new species. It is not a strawman it is a logical consequence of your own stated position. If you belief A and A implies B, asking you to defend your support of B is not a strawman.

xpe 7mo ago

Well said: > Before LLMs, [high quality code contribution] was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it. Now my twist on this: This same spirit is why local politics at the administrative level feels more functional than identity politics at the national level. The people that take the time to get involved with quotidian issues (e.g. for their school district) get their hands dirty and appreciate the specific constraints and tradeoffs. The very act of digging in changes you.

Havoc 7mo ago

Interesting breadth of takes in the comments. Think most people recognize though that AI can generate more than humans can reviewing so the model does need to change somehow. Either less AI on submitting side or more on reviewing side (if that’s even viable)

zenolove 7mo ago
Yeah, what happened to "review your own code first". Even before AI I used to ban linting so I could spot and reject code that clearly showed no effort was put in it. First occurrence of "undreadable" got a note, and a second one got a rejection. And by "undreadable" I do not intend missing semicolons or parenthesis styles or meaningless things like that. I mean obscured semantics or overcrowding and so on.
- cindyllm 7mo ago
  [dead]

ThomIves 7mo ago

With my type of development, I haven't run into the types of things, directly, that you very well explained, but I have personally run into the pain, I confess, of being OVERLY reliant on LLMs. I continue to try and learn from those hard lessons and develop a set of best practices in using AI to help me avoid those pain points in the future. This growing set of best practices is helping me a lot. The reason that I liked your article is because it confirmed some of those best practices that I have had to learn the hard way. Thanks!

CodenameTim 7mo ago
Thank you for the kind words! I'm happy this article resonated with you.

tombert 7mo ago

I agree with the sentiment but I am not sure the best way to go forward. Suppose I encounter a bug in a FOSS library I am using. Suppose then that I fix the bug using Claude or something. Suppose I then thoroughly test it and everything works fine. Isn’t it kind of selfish to not try and upstream it? It was so easy prior to AI.

zenolove 7mo ago
I don't think anybody would complain about working code. Your PR would explain your reasoning and choice of solution, and that on its own could make or break through acceptance criteria. At least it would by mine. Errors are fine too. Just not negligence.
testaccount28 7mo ago
the thresholds of quality for "this works on my machine, for my purposes" and "this is viable to merge upstream" are _extremely_ different. claude code has no effect on this, except to confuse certain would-be contributors. imagine someone emailed you a diff with the note "idk lol. my friend sent me this, and it works on my machine". would you even consider applying it?
tetha 7mo ago
It depends on the complexity and if your LLM-driven changes fight the architecture of the project. Some changes are in the area of "Well no one did that yet because no one needed it or had time for it", or "Well shit, no one thought of that". If Claude Code did these changes with good documentation and good intent and guidance behind it, why not? It is an honest and valid improvement to the library. Some other changes rip core assumptions of the library apart. They were easy, because Claude Code did the ripping and tearing. In such a case, is it really a contribution to improve the library? If we end up with a wasteland of code torn apart by AI just because?
gverrilla 7mo ago
While I see the point you're trying to make, truth is 90% of the times at least it will be a workaround instead of a proper solution. Even if it's a proper solution, there's a high chance it will only work on your specific setup - most open source software are made for a range array of systems, configurations, etc. That plus ai sycophancy means, in my opinion, a great portion of contributions made in this manner will be bad, and waste maintainers time - which is obviously undesirable. On my first week of claude code I submitted a PR to a FOSS and I was 100% sure it was correct - ai was giving me great confindence, and it worked! But I had no clue about how that software worked - at all. I later sent an email to the maintainer, apologizing.

popcorncowboy 7mo ago

> it’s such an honor to have your name among the list of contributors I can't help but feel there's something very, very important in this line for the future of dev.

rowanseymour 7mo ago

I totally get this and I also think it's now the case that making a PR of any significant complexity, for a project you're not a maintainer of, isn't necessarily giving that project anything of value. That project's maintainers can run the same prompts you are running - and if they do, they'll do it with better oversight and understanding. If you want to help then maybe's it's more useful to just hashout the plan that'll be given to an AI agent by a maintainer.

iamleppert 7mo ago

The solution to this problem is for LLMs to get better at producing code and descriptions that doesn't look LLM generated. It's possible to prompt and get this as well, but obviously any of the big AI companies that want to increase engagement in their coding agent, and want to capture the open source market, should come up with a way to allow the LLM to produce unique of, but still correct code so that it doesn't look LLM-generated and can evade these kinds of checks.

jrochkind1 7mo ago

"For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human." This is so important. Most humans like communicating with other humans. For many (note, I didn't say all) open source collaborators, this is part of the reward of collaborating on open source. Making them communicate with a bot pretending to be a human instead removes the reward and makes it feel terrible, like the worst job nobody would want. If you spent any time at all actually trying to help the contributor underestand and develop their skills, you just feel like an idiot. It lowers the patience of everyone in the entire endeavor, ruining it for everyone.

seanp2k2 7mo ago
It’s probably already too late to put these horses back in the barn, but having an “allow AI commits / PRs” would have probably been a good idea for GitHub to make available to projects. Even better might have been something like a robots.txt for repos with rules that could be auto-evaluated and PRs auto-rejected if they weren’t followed. Then again, we see how well robots.txt was honored in practice over the years. As with everything in late-stage capitalism, the humans who showed up with good intentions to legitimately help typically did the right things, and those who came to extract every last gram of value out of something for their own gain ignored the rules with few consequences.
nohren 7mo ago
This is a similar hot issue in academia right now. The ability to generate content in papers via llm is much easier than the ability to thoughtfully review them. There are now two tracks, at least in ICML that I saw, one for AI submitted papers and one for non AI submitted papers. And it works the same respectively for reviewers. However even for AI submitted papers, you cannot have only AI review it. Of course it needs human analysis, but still its tricky what you are going to get. And they are reviewing whether anonymity can still stand or if tying your credibilty to the review process is now necessary. As for open source PRs, I wonder if for trust's sake you would need to self identify the use of AI in your response (All AI, some AI, no AI). And there would need to be some sort of AI detection algorithm flag your response as % AI. I wonder if this would force people to at least translate the LLM responses to their own words. It would for sure stop the issue of someone's WhatsApp 24/7 claw bot cranking out PR slop. Maybe this can lessen the reviewers burden. That being said, more thought is needed to distinguish helpful LLM use that enhances the objective vs unhelpful slop that places burden on the reviewer. For instance I copy pasted the above to gemini and it produced an excellent condensing of my thoughts, "It is now 10x easier to generate a "plausible" paper or Pull Request (PR) than it is to verify its correctness."

lukasgraf 7mo ago

The best people I've worked with tended to go out of their way to make it as easy for me as possible to critique their ideas or implementations. They spelled out exactly their assumptions, the gaps in their knowledge, what they have struggled with during implementation, behavior they observed but don't fully understand, etc. Their default position was that their contribution was not worth considering unless they can sell it to the reviewer, by not assuming their change deserves to get merged because of their seniority or authority, but by making the other person understand how any why it works. Especially so if the reviewer was their junior. When describing the architecture, they made an effort to communicate it so clearly that it became trivial for others to spot flaws, and attack their ideas. They not only provided you with ammunition to shoot down their ideas, they handed you a loaded gun, safety off, and showed you exactly where to point it. If I see that level of humility and self-introspection in a PR, I'm not worried, regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved. But then there's people that created PRs with changes where the stack didn't even boot / compile, because of trivial errors. They already did that before, and now they've got LLMs. Those are the contributions I'm very worried about. So unlike people in other threads here, I don't agree at all with "If the code works, does it matter how it was produced and presented?". For me, the meta / out-of-band information about a contribution is a massive signal, today more than ever.

Fomite 7mo ago

AI so often doesn't actually increase productivity - it just shifts the burden of work from the person creating to the person who has to check and evaluate that creation. In this case, offloading yet more work onto the maintainers of the package, because you can't be bothered, but still want credit.

marystepp 7mo ago

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