Comment by fzaninotto

3 days ago

I've closed my share of AI-generated PRs on some OSS repositories I maintain. These contributors seem to jump from one project to another, until their contribution is accepted (recognized ?).

I wonder how long the open-source ecosystem will be able to resist this wave. The burden of reviewing AI-generated PRs is already not sustainable for maintainers, and the number of real open-source contributors is decreasing.

Side note: discovering the discussions in this PR is exactly why I love HN. It's like witnessing the changes in our trade in real time.

12 comments

fzaninotto

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inejge  3 days ago

> I wonder how long the open-source ecosystem will be able to resist this wave.

This PR was very successfully resisted: closed and locked without much reviewing. And with a lot of tolerance and patience from the developers, much more than I believe to be fruitful: the "author" is remarkably resistant to argument. So, I think that others can resist in the same way.

  • phatskat  3 days ago

    Successfully resisted, yes, but it also looks like a lot of actual human hours went into even replying to the PR in the first place. At what point do.l maintainers get overwhelmed with just politely rejecting PRs and throw their hands up because the time they allocated to the project they love has all been eaten up with rejecting slop?

raincole  3 days ago

Open-source maintainers will resist this wave even just because they don't want to be mocked on HN/Reddit/their own forums.

It's corporation software that we need to worry about.

  • the_gipsy  3 days ago

    OSS has always pushed back, just because of the maintenance burden in general, and corporate can just "fix it later" because there are literally devs on payroll. Or at least push through and then dump the project, the goal is just completely different, each style works in its context.

    But I don't know if corporate software can really "push through" these new amounts of code, without also automating the testing part.

everybodyknows  2 days ago

Does your own experience align with that of the maintainer who wrote:

> in my personal experience, reviewing AI-written code is more taxing that reviewing human-written code

mbac32768  1 day ago

> I wonder how long the open-source ecosystem will be able to resist this wave. The burden of reviewing AI-generated PRs is already not sustainable for maintainers, and the number of real open-source contributors is decreasing.

I think the burden is on AI fanbois to ship amazing tools in novel projects before they ask projects with reputations to risk it all on their hype.

To deliver a kernel of truth wrapped in a big bale of sarcasm: you're thinking of it all wrong! The maintainers are supposed to also use AI tools to review the PRs. That's much more sustainable and would allow them to merge 13,000 line PRs several times a day, instead of taking weeks/months to discuss every little feature.

The difference here of course is in how impressed you are by AI tools. The OCaml maintainers are not (and rightly so, IMO), whereas the PR submitter thinks they're so totally awesome and leaving tons of productivity on the table because they're scared of progress or insecure about their jobs or whatever.

Maybe OCaml could advance rapidly if they just YOLO merged big ambitious AI generated PRs (after doing AI code reviews) but that would be a high risk move. They have a reputation for being mature, high quality, and (insanely) reasonable. They would torch it very quickly if people knew this was happening and I think most people here would say the results would be predictably bad.

But lets take the submitter's argument at face value. If AI is so awesome, then we should be able to ship code in new projects unhampered by gatekeepers who insist on keeping slow humans in the loop. Or, to paraphrase other AI skeptics, where's all of the shovelware? How come all of these AI fanbois can only think about laundering their contributions through mature projects instead of cranking out amazing new stuff?

Where's my OCaml compiler 100% re-written in Rust that only depends on the Linux kernel ABI? Should cost a few hundred bucks in Claude credits at most?

To be clear, the submitter has gotten the point and said he was taking his scraps and going to make his own sausage (some Lisp thing). The outcome of that project should be very informative.