Comment by alhirzel

This is going to get crazy as soon as companies start to assert their control over open source code bases (rather than merely proprietary code bases) to attempt to overturn policies like this and normalize machine-generated contributions.

OSS contribution by these "emulated humans" is sure to lever into a very good economic position for compute providers and entities that are able to manage them (because they are inexpensive relative to humans, and are easier to close a continuous improvement loop on, including by training on PR interactions). I hope most experienced developers are skeptical of the sustainability of running wild with these "emulated humans" (evaporation of entry level jobs etc), but it is only a matter of time before the shareholder's whip cracks and human developers can no longer hold the line. It will result in forks of traditional projects that are not friendly to machine-generated contributions. These forks will diverge so rapidly from upstream that there will be no way to keep up. I think this is what happened with Reticulum. [1]

When assurance is needed that the resulting software is safe (e.g. defense/safety/nuclear/aero industries), the cost of consuming these code bases will be giant, and is largely an externalized cost of the reduction in labor costs, by way of the reduced probability of high quality software. Unfortunately, by this time, the aforementioned assertions of control will have cleared the path, and the standard will be reduced for all.

Hold the line, friends... Like one commenter on the GitHub issue said, helping to train these "emulated humans" literally moves carbon from the earth to the air. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

[2]: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/790