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Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use th
by Retr0id 4mo ago
Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use them.
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoUnfortunately "I donated money/tokens to open source" doesn't land interviews as well as "I'm a big contributor to open source" People spamming Open Source repos with AI PRs aren't trying to help Open Source, they're trying to build a brand, some kind of credible online presence with their username on it, or whatever else. It's purely selfish and completely opposite to the spirit of Open Software imo
- bitmasher9 4mo agoThis is the most uncharitable outlook on the increase of PRs. It may be true for some contributors, but any company reviewing their GitHub will see that the code is largely spam. I think most AI generated code is people that want to help the project, but maybe aren’t familiar with the standards and norms.
- bluefirebrand 4mo agoI don't have much charity in my heart for people using AI to spam every corner of the public internet with slop
- Planktonne 4mo agoIf their AI model is good enough to make PRs, it's good enough for them to ask it about standards and norms. They can't be both massively enabled and helplessly unaware.
- ffaccount2 4mo ago>People spamming Open Source repos with AI PRs aren't trying to help Open Source, they're trying to build a brand I am certain many of them honestly believe that they are doing the right thing and that they are helping. After all hey, they implemented a feature or fixed a bug for the community! It's a grim worldview if you think they are all just selfish.
- parliament32 4mo agoThey're stuck in this idea that somehow they're better at prompting the slop generator than anyone else, therefore they're helpful and people definitely want their output merged in to these various projects. They will have trouble understanding that their personal contribution to the whole process is somewhere between negligible and harmful, and simply donating those tokens to a maintainer who is actually aware of how the codebase works and where all the skeletons are is a much better proposition.
- Larrikin 4mo agoI would argue this is naive and there's very little evidence to support this opinion other than just wishing it was true. It may happen on smaller projects with few users but not in meaningful large projects.
- janalsncm 4mo ago> there's very little evidence to support this opinion other than just wishing it was true Building a brand doesn’t require submitting to someone else’s open source project. You can do the same thing by creating your own OSS project. For a lot of them it’s probably a little of column A and a little of column B. If people are submitting in their real name it’s more likely they’re building a brand. I also think it’s possible for someone to genuinely think they are helping without trying to build reputation.
- Sharlin 4mo agoOh but you see, own OSS projects are not worth much unless they got stars. Anyone can now fill their GitHub space with a hundred vibecoded projects in an afternoon, it's worth nothing unless it comes with social proof.
- thewebguyd 4mo agoYeah. I'm sure some (maybe a lot?) are for selfish reasons, but there is also a pretty large section of users who have always wanted to contribute, help out, or make some features in their favorite projects and just never had the skill or opportunity to do so and see LLMs as a way for them to final actualize that desire. Think about it from the perspective of a non-programmer, or even total non-technical person. Vibe coding to someone like that looks like complete magic. Suddenly to that person, a whole new world has opened up. Ideas, features, bug fixes they've always wanted but could never do now look possible. That particular group of people don't see it as spamming the maintainer, they genuinely feel like they're finally able to help.
- parliament32 4mo agoFor now. Give it another half year and "I contribute to open source" will carry the same weight as "I donate to charity" ie nobody cares because any idiot can do it. I wonder how long it'll take before "I don't use LLMs for coding" carries weight.
- sureglymop 4mo agoInterestingly then, those contributions are also not a measurement of the candidates abilities but mostly of the AI models. I wonder if hiring adjusts to that but I doubt it. It might only push it even more towards "marketing matters most" instead of actual ability.
- stackghost 4mo ago>I wonder if hiring adjusts to that but I doubt it Tech hiring/interviews have almost nothing to do with assessing the candidates' ability to do the job.
- janalsncm 4mo agoThere are so many leetcode questions where solving it requires knowing some trick. Part of the trap for SWEs is that once you know the trick you feel smarter, but it really has nothing to do with software engineering. Now that Claude is the best leetcoder in the world it would be great if companies which intend to hire humans would reconsider asking such dumb questions.
- slaymaker1907 4mo agoI've personally started focusing a lot more on code quality and communication skills over correctness of solving some leetcode problem. If I could get the infrastructure in place for it in the interview, I would have candidates generate something via AI and watch their process for that (how do they evaluate a plan, how do they review the code, etc.).
- janalsncm 4mo agoForce them to use a bad LLM and clean up the code?
- toss1 4mo agoA fine example of Goodhart's law: "When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement." Measuring open source contributions as a way to judge prospective employees used to be a good measurement. Of course, prospective employees started to not only contribute to OS projects because it was good, but to make sure their contributions were high and noticeable — contributing not for the good of the project but for their own good, and now with amplification of AI 'contributions'. So, measuring contributions to open source projects is now approximately worthless for evaluating prospective employees.
- elif 4mo agoMaybe I'm optimistic or not typical but in my experience people submit random PR to open source projects because they really want the project to do xyz for their own project/reasons, and the project doesn't do xyz. And the PR is considered "spam" because the maintainer doesn't see xyz as part of his needs or his vision for the project.
- Sharlin 4mo agoBeing able to donate tokens won't help with that, unless the project maintainers also want the project to do xyz.
- pavel_lishin 4mo agoLike this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48621645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48621645
- jayd16 4mo agoHow about just cash?
- mort96 4mo agoMaybe we should cut out the middle man and make it easy for people to donate money to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide whether to use them on tokens or hosting or developer salaries or something else.
- pornel 4mo agoSo that's how the sci-fi dystopias end up using "credits" for their money.
- edm0nd 4mo agoas an open source project maintainer, we dont want tokens bro, we want $.
- junon 4mo agoAh yes, the for-profit companies that trained their commercial models off of all our open source code from the last 50 years need more money from us.