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Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV
- fnfjfjf 2mo ago[flagged]
- ChuckMcM 2mo agoI think the author meant 'burnish' there, which is a clever way of showing they didn't use AI :-)
- walrus01 2mo ago[flagged]
- ElProlactin 2mo ago[flagged]
- latentsea 2mo ago[flagged]
- esafak 2mo agoI wonder if LLMs can tell when you're taking the mickey out of them. Has anybody tried imitating its mannerisms and had it react? There's a new benchmark for you: SelfAwareness!
- latentsea 2mo agoSee exhibit A: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vrlrud/gaslighting_claude_with_its_own_verbal_tics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vrlrud/gaslighti... So funny. And yes, we should 100% find a way to turn this into a benchmark.
- alansaber 2mo agoFurnish makes more sense.
- gilleain 2mo agoBoth are fine, but I also prefer 'furnish', as in put in the main parts of your CV. In a way, 'burnish' is more like 'polish', suggesting an extra layer on top, rather than the fundamental parts.
- dumpsterdiver 2mo ago> The changes were harmless and correct, but that did not make me feel better about accepting or merging them. So do you have the project’s best interest at heart or not? If you’re more concerned about the intent of a valid contribution than the content, why don’t you ask yourself where your intent is? You rejected a valid contribution based on unverified vibes about the person’s intent, instead of assuming they were just being helpful.
- inigyou 2mo ago[flagged]
- cwillu 2mo agoThe changes were grammar and spelling fixes in comments. It is not sufficient for someone to intend to be helpful.
- alansaber 2mo agoIf people can spam low-effort PRs they will. Unverified vibes is you closing your eyes to a very real issue.
- herrherrmann 2mo agoI think it’s implied that accepting these kinds of PRs will take time away from working on actual improvements to the codebase. So, on the long term it’s better to be strict with these kinds of silly contributions, and focus on changes that matter more (e.g. features or fixes).
- customguy 2mo agoWhy not assume someone does have the best interest of their own project at heart? How do you get to question that out of the gate, while pretending automated grammar and spelling fixes to rack up PR counts are benevolent unless proven otherwise? Simply assume the person who made the thing you didn't make, who was the only person (or persons) on the planet to come up with that exact thing, knows what's best for that person (or persons). Just like you would handle your own stuff.
- inigyou 2mo ago
- hsn915 2mo agoThis is weird though. Obviously the best way to use AI to furnish your CV is to build your own project using AI.
- alansaber 2mo agoVibe slop or put on your C.V "contributor to <wellknownproject>"? In terms of social currency B wins easily, unless you can guerilla market as well as Openclaw.
- Barrin92 2mo agothat won't work because all those millions of 'projects' are unmaintainable vaporware which is exactly why people try to piggyback on the reputation of software that is actually being used and developed by people
- timokoesters 2mo agoHi Neil, fun to see you on HN. I agree with your points and I you summarized it very well as "Ultimately, open source is built on trust". AI is destroying trust in open source and many other areas and I think this will discourage teams from publishing their source code in the future. On the other hand, personal connections are becoming even more important, which is unfair to the younger generation and people who don't live near tech hubs.
- inigyou 2mo agoToday's conception of open source is different from the original anyway. It used to be "we made this thing, here's the code" but now it's turned into some kind of weird parasocial thing more akin to Facebook.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bitwize 2mo agoI explained GitHub to a friend as "like DeviantArt, but for code". And it is true, but that just means the bar for expectations has been raised thanks to early open source success. Tarball drops don't cut it anymore (unless you're Alphabet, Inc.) and you actually have to foster a community around what you release in order to attract bug reports and contributions. And you need a code of conduct, and a code of conduct enforcement committee, and a steering committee or board of directors, and...
- hypfer 2mo agoYou don't need any of that, usually. You just scratch your own itch and you're done. There is no need to "attract contribution", usually, as usually, your project will do exactly what you need.
- inigyou 2mo agoif you want success on DeviantArt. where is sqlite's GitHub? It doesn't have one because it drops tarballs.
- yeputons 2mo agoI’ve heard about similar issues with Hacktoberfest’s T-shirts back in 2020, but it was not as automated back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
- matsemann 2mo agoI was thinking the same. The amount of effort people went through just for a t-shirt. Now you can try to boost your career, far more valuable, and even with less effort. Of course it will happen, unfortunately.
- arjie 2mo agoThis makes sense. Apart from the original thing, I no longer upstream anything. It just takes comparatively more effort than maintaining a private fork with my own idiosyncratic fix. This must mean that even small fixes that non-contributors would make in the past are just happening off the books, so to speak. e.g. I upstreamed a tiny fix to Thrift codegen because some function could be much faster. These days I wouldn't bother. I'd just fork and leave upstream to be upstream. I suspect many people are like me since it feels like a very normie position to take. That means that contributors are even more likely to be useful because both the drive-by genuine contributors have chosen otherwise and these contributors have increased. It must be quite painful to be an open source maintainer right now. One wonders what to make of such projects in a future where a feature-list is a sufficient prompt.
- zamadatix 2mo agoI ran through exactly this thought process & LLM based resolution just 8 hours ago with a segfault compiling a project which likely doesn't care about the given platform combo much.
- arjie 2mo agoClassic problem. I recall spending a long time trying to get Freespace 2 SCP working on the Via Unichrome onboard GPU I had decades ago. Who could possibly have cared for that? The intersection of the two sets was probably precisely one person. By the way, interesting person to have 512 IPv4s (and two /44s? Aren't those enormous?). Root-level http intentionally user/pass gated on your site? I was curious to see.
- zamadatix 2mo ago:D. Tl;dr: it's actually near minimal to dual stack and do BGP between 2 sites of redundant services with advertisement failover to the internet. /48 is the smallest accepted IPv6 advertisement and /24 the smallest allowed IPv4 advertisement (on the net at least). IPv6 assignments are done on the nibble (/48, /44, /40, ...). Since I only have two sites I could have gotten away with a /23 and something like a /44 but then the RIR pointed out it'd probably be cleaner to manage to get a /40 and give each site a /44 at the same renewal cost. As to why, I've just always worked in or near the networking field and so it seemed cheaper/easier to run it all myself in the long run. Through another very long story, the Org ID + ASN + IPv4 space + IPv6 space ended up costing something like ~$1k the first year and then ~$500 in yearly renewals. I'm not legally able to resell these for the massive market rate prices of /24s because of them being leased for $0 specifically to dual stack my core hosted services like DNS with my own public IP, but that's fine as I got them to use :). The largest assignment I've ever had the pleasure of getting and deploying was a /32 (... of IPv6!) for an extremely large healthcare system. Certainly no great record smasher, but I thought it was cool to work on an IPv6 subnet so big it could have been an IPv4 route nonetheless! That one was still also very sparse of course, but similar kinds of reasoning ended up getting to that being much easier/better to work with than a dense assignment. I also have a small MAC address range (a classical "OUI" sized range is 24 bits of addresses, I have 12 bits of addresses) for a small run of some hardware I was making for a particular customer use case. With the leftovers I put my laptop on it and get the occasional "how the hell?" when they see Wireshark decode my laptop MAC as "Dan_Smith_xx_xx" while packet capturing to troubleshoot.
- smooc 2mo agoSo the fixes are still fixes, but we (I am also a OSS maintainer) are unwilling to accept them as they boost the contributor’s status where we think the merit is very or extremely limited. Why not have these PRs counted differently (by the platform), and/or colored differently in the timeline(s) thus made less visible or more clear?
- hypfer 2mo agoThe whole idea of "counting PRs" as a vanity metric is flawed because vanity metrics are flawed. I don't think that there is a technical solution to be found here, as the problem is anything but technical. __ A hack/trap: Comment "Ah yes thanks a lot for the hint :)", then make the changes yourself. Then see how the person reacts to that. Hack the grifters. Hack the planet.
- flyingshelf 2mo agoMy solution is to ask them for proof of work. Many of these disappear after opening a PR that they never tested. How can you claim to have fixed a visual issue without a screenshot? Insta-close.
- __david__ 2mo agoOr just pull the pr into your local git, git amend --reset-author, and then push it to master yourself.
- stackghost 2mo agoMerging commits/PRs without reading them is how you get a 2024 xz situation.
- yuiegi 2mo ago[flagged]
- gunnarmorling 2mo agoI very much can relate, as I've also been receiving many of these drive-by PRs lately. One big problem I have with them is that they take away time from project maintainers for reviewing and helping to get the PRs into shape, which then can't be spent on other, more important things. I feel like the "good first issue" GitHub label is specifically attracting these kinds of contributions. It's not a black-or-white thing though, and you need to tell apart folks who produce slop PRs against any arbitrary repo, from folks using AI to contribute in a sensible way. We've tried to codify some rules in our contribution guide [1]: - PRs from apparent bot accounts are closed - PRs from users who file large numbers against random repos are closed - You're welcome to use AI, but you need to stand behind your PR and be able to explain it I'm sure we'll adjust those rules over time, but since we have instantiated them, it definitely has become easier to deal with AI PRs and handle them in an a relatively objective way. It absolutely means that sometimes a PR will be closed which could have been an improvement, but I think this is the right thing to do given the circumstances. [1] https://github.com/hardwood-hq/hardwood/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#a-note-on-ai-assisted-contributions https://github.com/hardwood-hq/hardwood/blob/main/CONTRIBUTI...
- 6stringmerc 2mo ago[dead]
- ReptileMan 2mo agoCreate AI to review the pull requests and auto ban people for low SNR.
- jspdown 2mo agoAI code review is nice to have an additional pair of eyes but it doesn't substitute to the maintainer eyes. A big part of a review is deciding if you want that change merged in. Not because of the immediate code but what it means to the project to bring this in. AI code review, to my eyes, just reduce the number of bugs, they do not shorten the review time. Otherwise, it means you are compromising on the direction of the project.
- ReptileMan 2mo agoI meant AI to judge whether a PR is trash or not for ban purposes. Not AI to do the thorough code review itself.
- jspdown 2mo agoIn that case yes I think that can be of real value.
- nubinetwork 2mo agoThis is nothing new, people have been making spellcheck commits all over github for years... and that was before ai slop even existed.
- jspdown 2mo agoI help maintain a big project as well and I can totally relates what the author is describing. The amount of security advisories and PRs opened is getting out of hands. This is no longer just spell check PRs that you can merge in less than 1 minute of review. Often that's going to be supposed perf improvement, attempts at fixing things that are not broken, or submitting completely new features. These relatively low effort PRs takes a lot of effort to review or even just to filter out.
- hypfer 2mo agoGitHub flavored FOSS I believe works best for "corporate FOSS" projects and terrible for "FOSS as how it was conceived decades ago". Or rather I believe that it is engineered exactly for the former. What it does well is coordination between corps, working in public (while on a corp payroll) and extracting some drive-by-PR value out of random third-parties. The closer your project is to that shape, the better it works for you. The further it is away, the more pain you will feel. This has nothing to do with AI slop. AI slop just turned up a few knobs that were already there.
- J253 2mo agoI also maintain a popular open source repo and have seen similar. If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!) with no associated issue I also have no qualms closing. I do generally leave a short note about why I closed (volume of these is around 5/week) showing how far off they (Claude) was and encourage opening an issue where we can start a discussion which rarely happens for the drive-by folks. So I totally feel this but I find myself more disheartened by the practice than angry. It feels like slowly watching open-source go the way of email. Open and free until no-cost spam ruined the inbox for everyone...
- jbs789 2mo agoInteresting analogy. Sounds like an opportunity for GitHub/others to better filter these.
- bhaak 2mo ago> If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!) Claude doesn't read AGENTS.md automatically, it only looks for CLAUDE.md.
- n_plus_1_acc 2mo agoVery intelligent
- J253 2mo agoTrue, but I do have a claude.md as well. Point is, best practice agentic development doesn’t seem to be on display.
- skrebbel 2mo ago[dead]
- initramfs 2mo agoI only look for humans.md and humans.txt.
- oleg_antonyan 2mo agoDo recruiters actually care about your open source contributions? Especially now when only LLMs read CVs and match them against strict criteria, I doubt there are many companies that actually care about your work outside of work, in fact they might care in opposite direction - thinking that you'll be distracted from work
- fhd2 2mo agoJust speculating (I use zero automation when recruiting), but automated candidate ranking systems could well still look for signals that were valuable years ago, but no longer are. It's not a given that people using this stuff even understand the criteria under the hood. Same story as SEO, I presume. Google surely understood their ranking criteria deeply, yet couldn't exactly win that fight.
- rightbyte 2mo agoGoogle could have easily won that fight by blacklisting scrapping spam sites and spam portals. They just didn't. There weren't that many with high ranking. I could filter out most of them in like a week of working normally and just right clicking them with the blacklist extension in Firefox. Nowadays it is probably harder though when Google have broken the internet culture.
- fhd2 2mo agoIf you blacklist them just for yourself, the sites don't care, no economic impact. If Google does the same, they'll work around. There's lots of spam-only sites, but they also often cleverly avoid detecting by mixing in content ranked as valuable/legit. SEO also certainly "attacked" otherwise legitimate sites like Reddit, although what GEO is doing there is far worse I imagine.
- rightbyte 2mo agoSure. It probably works better in isolation. But there seemed to be some time lag for a SEO spam sites to climb. Removing the ones that make it would mess up the economics at the time. Like the Stack Overflow mirror sites or like spam phone number pages with no other information but the number. And I guess plenty of search queries would have no moderation. But I mean I spent like 10 minutes. You could have 10 FTE doing that.
- fguerraz 2mo agoThese maintainer who’ve held the sacred fire for years…
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoThese idea guys who longed for the fire for years- and still don't have it.. full of envy..
- fguerraz 2mo agoI'm sure there are people in this category, but there's also the other category who just want their stuff to work, and now can as AI to do it, without having to follow stupid processes (try contributing to QT...) or arguing for months.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo agoA ton of these "process" cruft is unneeded and gate-keeping in companies. But in open-source- process is unpaid for sparse- and the gate-keepers usually have excellent reasons to merge changes not back. If they don't - they are forked. The reason being that while the software generated "solves" your problem, it generates problems for everyone else using the project. Like demanding a elevator cabin be tailored to your preferences, ignoring all the other buildings using elevator cabins, to which it no longer is compatible for example.
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo ago“The spirits that I summoned, I cannot now dismiss.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer%27s_Apprentice
- mrasong 2mo ago[dead]
- alkonaut 2mo agoIronically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the project". Automated PR's can have automated responses. You make a human effort, you get a human response.
- mikemcquaid 2mo agoWe do similar in Homebrew by autoclosing opens without the issue template (which implies using the API which often now implies AI). The weird flip side is that the average good AI contribution is better than the average “I used no AI” contribution. Perhaps it’s because Homebrew has so many declarative guardrails and is so easy for agents to test.
- satvikpendem 2mo agoNext time I'll have Codex use computer usage to manually fill out the template, lol.
- mikemcquaid 2mo agoAs long as you have it disclose itself: feel free. We're not anti-AI use, we're just anti-low-effort AI use and don't see the need to apply effort to educate people who haven't applied the effort themselves.
- codingisfreedom 2mo agoI think the idea of leveraging AI to find useless PRs is right. I didn’t like the second part though where it starts banning people for “bad behavior”. I get that AI resistance will be a thing in the next few years, but realistically engineers who plan on being around for the next 20-30 years just need to embrace it instead of being sour about it. Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a whole. People who seek more elevated/finer products can still turn to handcrafted products. Mass software will be produced by AI, and it will scale just fine.
- Eueudhsbsj32 2mo agoSeems like a contributor reputation score (shared across all projects) that one can build up over time would be a clean solution to the low quality pull requests.
- kodoman 2mo agoI think opensource has decided to become big corporate cheerleader for a while and not actually done things strictly in the interest of users or developers, but providing the ideological justification as to why big companies can use their code and not give a dime back. I think aside from free software there could have been a movement where contributing to a free-software project would have allowed contributors to get payed and this would have to preclude companies simply using code as they can in say the MIT license and not give back. Instead opensource is full of cynical projects and real important projects that do amazing work with maintainers who shoulder a great burden having to listen to people bitch about them for features and fixes while giving nothing and dealing with bad PR's (or even just having to evaluate good and mediocre PR's). Often the only pay is that you can go to HR and shit corp with your CV and say "Here is what I have done, can I now be treated like a bitch for more money". I think opensource has allowed a lot businesses to treat developers with contempt and this is fully manifest with the way they conceive of AI agent's and Open source has probably become a vector for demoralization and devaluation more then anything.
- neilv 2mo agoIMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone. Actually, if I see someone doing open source like it's a performative career checkbox, that will not be positive signal, and could easily be negative. I understand that people will do what they need to do to get a job, but that pragmatic career checkboxing itself isn't positive. I will have to look for positive signal elsewhere for that person. The problem is that our industry has gotten very bad at hiring, and now we have everyone playing all sorts of games with it -- rehearsing Leetcode interviews, bad faith open source contributions, feigning enthusiasm, spamming AI-tweaked resumes, outright cheating on interviews -- rather than focusing on doing good work, and being part of a team. If you're involved in hiring, and you care about effectiveness and culture, consider pushing back against the prevailing dysfunctional big-corporate-cattle-herding practices. Especially if your company has no excuse to be big-corporate dysfunctional, and can't afford to be.
- lnsru 2mo agoDoing good work leads you nowhere. You need to be in the game of power. Be visible, know every 3 levels of managers by name. Otherwise you’re only number in payroll’s sheet. Modern tech companies are not different from world war 2 era factories imho. Account xyz@bigcompany pushing lines of code to endless repo. No face, no name. Boring. Boring reasonable and reliable. That’s not what hiring people are looking for. You must be a rockstar, conference speaker and leader of few open source projects now. Skills, experience and good work ethic is not enough.
- hyperadvanced 2mo agoFor all of this fear and loathing, I am just a regular guy with a regular tech job and there are dozens of people like me at work. They’re all there because they do good work.
- expedited123 2mo agoThe moment something becomes a clear signal for brilliance, it immediately stops being useful as it will be imitated. Reminds me of this xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2899:_Goodhart%27s_Law https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2899:_Goodhart%27...
- thoopring 2mo ago[flagged]
- olalonde 2mo agoI've submitted PRs for typos in the (pre-LLM) past, not to boost my GH profile, but because I thought I was being helpful. Guess I was wrong...
- oblio 2mo agoScale matters. If people do it, it's maybe 10 PRs like that per month. With AI there could be hundreds per day.
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agoThen that AI is fixing hundreds of typos a day, seems like win.
- brabel 2mo agoExactly. Why are people looking for problems here?? There isn’t any. There wasn’t 100s of PRs so why are you so worried about that?? Stop assuming there will be unless you stop even the useful ones.
- oblio 2mo agoThat's assuming absolutely 0 cost for reviewing and merging what ultimately are low value PRs.
- kazinator 2mo agoJust hold off on merging them. When enough typo PRs accumulate, squash all their commits into one, with yourself as Author. Give credit to the contributors in the commit message.
- jarym 2mo ago> raised three separate PRs to correct spelling and grammar mistakes in comments. > The changes were harmless and correct, > I closed all three PRs without comment. What is this article? I get real ‘AI slop PRs’ are nightmares - but I take that to mean the wave of AI generated PRs that read convincingly but are in the end bullshit. But your example is NOT that. The unreasonable counter to your point: don’t make spelling mistakes in the first place? Or switch off PRs if you don’t want things corrected?
- hypfer 2mo agoThere is a statistically significant correlation between comments on HN not getting the point and a GitHub user existing under the same moniker with a default pfp and no content.
- jarym 2mo agoWhat are you talking about? My GH profile is not my HN name. If you don’t have a valid point why post rubbish?
- hypfer 2mo agoI think everything is said here already, but there's still yet another interesting detail worth mentioning. Reading the tea leaves, this initially said NH instead of HN, which might be a typo, but might also be "hacker news" but in the native language. Which would possibly line up with commit messages. Anyway, low trust internet is here. Enjoy
- jarym 2mo agoLow trust or not, we still have to deal with trolls.
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agoOpen source contributions as a signal of developer quality is a thing of the past. Open source contribution on github specifically is no longer about building and maintaining something, its a parasocial signal that has more in common with linkedin hustle bloggers.
- paweladamczuk 2mo agoWhen technically correct PRs (actual fixes, harmless) get rejected, maybe it's a signal that the codebases are too big? My big hope for LLM coding is that it will finally force us to focus on minimizing the amount of code that is out there instead of ever producing more.
- krisgenre 2mo agoWhile exploring an open-source project recently, I noticed a bug in the initial setup. I asked Claude to verify it, and the AI confirmed the issue. When Claude asked if I wanted to file a bug report, I agreed, assuming it would simply generate a formatted text block for me to copy and paste. However, I soon realized it had actually submitted the issue directly to GitHub. It turned out I had the GitHub CLI installed and was logged in with my work account. Out of curiosity, I then asked Claude to draft an enhancement request for a new feature. It created a highly detailed issue and went on to generate the corresponding code for the enhancement. I haven't submitted a pull request because the code is written in a language I don't know. Part of me considered submitting it anyway since it works and could be useful, but after reading this post, I think I'll just keep it under wraps.
- kkapelon 2mo agoYou are lucky that you got valid PRs that actually fix something. I got PRs that either never worked or even broke stuff https://blog.codepipes.com/llms/your-pr-was-rejected.html https://blog.codepipes.com/llms/your-pr-was-rejected.html
- unified101 2mo agoOpen source is solved. Human PRs are gunking up the process PRs submission should be closed, and only issue submission, with a prompt to reccreate and fix the issue should be shared. This way the prompts users are using to do things - the real contribution - will make their way to maintainers who can then choose to convert it into a PR and merge.
- coder-pm 2mo agoHmm I thought the contribution graphs were always the currency, the only difference is that the AI made gaming them free:) In my company we finally have it all documented, it’s super easy to find which PR made the regression and our internal policies and rules clearly state that you are the owner of the PR, not the AI so the ownership remains on human side, AI mistake is your mistake so everyone pays extra attention to that.
- astralmaster 2mo ago[flagged]
- bombcar 2mo agoWhat we need is a single line that can only be written two ways, each of which has a subtle security issue, so AIs can flip-flop it back and forth forever.
- majora2007 2mo agoOne thing that really interests me is declining to issue CVEs. I get a lot of AI submitted security issues and they all want CVEs. But some are simple idor to access information around an age rating on selfhosted software for friends and family. Does anyone have any advice when to decline CVEs?
- Sky_Joy3 2mo ago[flagged]