Comment by benterix

I wouldn't say they were dismissive of AI, just that they are unwilling to merge code that they don't have the time or motivation to review.

If you want AI code merged, make it small so it it's an easy review.

That being said, I completely understand being unwilling to merge AI code at all.

This is a good point. There's a lot of cheering for the Linus swearing style, but if the average developer did that they'd eventually get a talking-to by HR.

Please name it, so that we can know to avoid it and its products.

Well, you go one of two ways. Classic Torvalds is the other way, until an intervention was staged.

Is (or should that be) the goal, responsibility, or even purview of the maintainers of this project?

I think it's for me to redo the PR and break it into smaller pieces.

There's value in the PR in that it does not require you to install the separate OxCaml fork from Jane St which doesn't work with all the OCaml packages. Or wasn't when I tried it back in August.

The constructive outcome is the spammer fucks off or learns how to actually code.

Lots of people all over the world learn some basics of music in school, or even learn how to play the recorder, but if you mail The Rolling Stones with your "suggestions" you aren't going to get a response and certainly not a response that encourages you to keep spamming them with "better" recommendations.

The maintainers of an open source project are perfectly capable of coercing an LLM into generating code. You add nothing by submitting AI created code that you don't even understand. The very thought that you are somehow contributing is the highest level of hubris and ego.

No, there's is nothing you can submit without understanding code that they could not equally generate or write, and no, you do not have an idea so immensely valuable that it's necessary to vibe code a version.

If you CAN understand code, write and submit a PR the standard way. If you cannot understand code, you are wasting everyone's time because you are selfish.

This goes for LLM generated code in companies as well. If it's not clear and obvious from the PR that you went through and engineered the code generated, fixed up the wrong assumptions, cleaned up places where the LLM wasn't given tight enough specs, etc, then your code is not worth spending any time reviewing.

I can prompt Claude myself thank you.

The primary problem with these tools is that assholes are so utterly convinced that their time is infinitely valuable and my time is valueless because these people have stupidly overinflated egos. They believe their trash, unworkable, unmaintainable slop puked out by an LLM is so damn valuable, because that's just how smart they are.

Imagine going up to the Civil Engineer building a bridge and handing them a printout from ChatGPT when you asked it "How do you build a bridge" and feeling smug and successful. That's what this is.

That’s why AI (and bad actors in general) is taking advantage of them. It’s sick.

> "It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI."

The AI wrote code which worked, for a problem the submitter had, which had not been solved by any human for a long time, and there is limited human developer time/interest/funding available for solving it.

Dumping a mass of code (and work) onto maintainers without prior discussion is the problem[1]. If they had forked the repo, patched it themselves with that PR and used it personally, would they have a broken brain because of AI? They claim to have read the code, tested the code, they know that other people want the functionality; is wanting to share working code a "broken brain"? If the AI code didn't work - if it was slop - and they wanted the maintainers to fix it, or walk them through every step of asking the AI to fix it - that would be a huge problem, but that didn't happen.

[1] copyrightwashing and attribution is another problem but also not one that's "broken brain by the existence of AI" related.

Years back I attended someone doing an NSF outreach tour in support of Next Generation Science Standards. She was breathtaking (literally - bated breath on "how is that question going to be handled?!?"). Heartfelt hostile misguided questions, too confused to even attain wrong, somehow got responses which were, not merely positive and compassionate, but which managed to gracefully pull out constructive insights for the audience and questioner. One of those "How do I learn this? Can I be your apprentice?" moments.

The Wikipedia community (at least 2 decades back) was also notable. You have a world of nuttery making edits. The person off their meds going article by article adding a single letter "a". And yet a community ethos that emphasized dealing with them with gentle compassion, and as potential future positive contributors.

Skimming a recent "why did perl die" thread, one thing I didn't see mentioned... The perl community lacked the cultural infrastructure to cope with the eternal-September of years of continuous newcomer questions, becoming burned out and snarky. The python community emphasized it's contrast with this, "If you can't answer with friendly professionalism, we don't need your reply today" (or something like that).

Moving from tar files with mailing lists, to now community repos and git and blogs/slack/etc, there's been a lot of tech learned. For example, Ruby's Gems repo was explicitly motivated by "don't be python" (then struggling without a central community repo). But there's also been the social/cultural tech learned, for how to do OSS at scale.

> My only doubt is whether this has a good or bad effect overall

I wonder if a literature has developed around this?

I don't think 'hostility' is called for, but certainly a little bit more... bluntness.

But indeed, huge props to the maintainers for staying so cool.

I work with contractors in construction and often have to throw in vulgarity for them to get the point. This feels very similar to when I'm too nice

I think it’s really good for people to have good case studies like this they can refer to in the case of ai prs as a justification rather than having to take the time themselves