Comment by a-dub
19 days ago
this highlights the saddest thing about this whole generative ai thing. beforehand, there was opportunity to learn, deliver and prove oneself outside of classical social organization. now that's all going to go away and everyone is going to fall back on credentials and social standing. what an incredible shame for social mobility and those who for one reason or another don't fit in with traditional structures.
Vouch is a good quick fix, but it has some properties that can lead to collapsed states, discussed in the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811
it's also going to kill the open web. nobody is going to want to share their ideas or code publicly anymore. with the natural barriers gone, the incentives to share will go to zero. everything will happen behind closed doors.
You could argue that this could increase output to the open web: outsiders still need a place to clout chase.
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The origin of the problems with low-quality drive-by requests is github's social nature[0]. AI doesn't help, but it's not the cause.
I've seen my share of zero-effort drive-by "contributions" so people can pad their GH profile, long before AI, on tiny obscure projects I have published there: larger and more prominent projects have always been spammed.
If anything, the AI-enabled flood will force the reckoning that was long time coming.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731646
> that's all going to go away and everyone is going to fall back on credentials and social standing.
Only if you allow people like this to normalize it.
I feel this is a bit too pessimistic. For example, people can make tutorials that auto-certify in vouch. Or others can write agent skills that share etiquette, which agents must demonstrate usage of before PRs can be created.
Yes, there's room for deception, but this is mostly about superhuman skills and newcomer ignorance and a new eternal September that we'll surely figure out
argueably, the years 2015-2020, we should have gone back to social standing.
.. all revolving around a proprietary Microsoft service.
Support Microsoft or be socially shunned?
Vouch is forge-agnostic. See the 2nd paragraph in the README:
> The implementation is generic and can be used by any project on any code forge, but we provide GitHub integration out of the box via GitHub actions and the CLI.
And then see the trust format which allows for a platform tag. There isn't even a default-GitHub approach, just the GitHub actions default to GitHub via `--default-platform` flag (which makes sense cause they're being invoked ON GITHUB).
Define "platform".
So I can choose from github, gitlab or maybe codeberg? What about self-hosters, with project-specific forges? What about the fact that I have an account on multiple forges, that are all me?
This seems to be overly biased toward centralized services, which means it's just serving to further re-enforce Microsoft's dominance.
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I would rather stop contributing to open source rather than interact with your gatekeeping social experiment.
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I guess you could say the same about a lot of craft- or skill-based professions that ultimately got heavily automated.
It also marks the end of the open source movement as the value of source code has lost any meaning with vibe coding and ai.