Comment by myrmidon
11 days ago
The AI completeley failed to address the actual reasons for being rejected, and instead turned to soapboxing and personal insults.
Matplotlib is rejecting AI contributions for issues that are intended to onboard human contributors because those are wasted on AI agents, requiring the same level of effort from the project maintainers with none of the benefits (no meaningful learning on the AI side for now).
Furthermore, AI agents in an open source context (as independent contributors) are a burden for now (requiring review, being unable to meaningfully learn, and messing up in more frequent and different ways than human contributors).
If the project in question wanted huge volume of somewhat questionable changes without human monitoring/supervising/directing, they could just run those agents themselves, without any of the friction.
edit: Human "drive-by contributors" (people with very limited understanding of project specific conventions/processes/design, little willingness to learn and an interest in a singular "pet-peeve" feature or bug only) face quite similar pushback to AI agent contributors for similar reasons, in many projects (for arguably good reason).
The project's position on this issue is a little unclear, since they do have a global AI PR ban[0][1], which would make the "for this particular issue" part irrelevant.
[0] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...
[1] https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/devel/contribute.html#generat...
The "for first time contributors" rule seems reasonable, considering that AIs have an unfair advantage over (beginner) human programmers :)
Re: drive by contributors
I think the AI would agree with you here. It basically made the same argument in its follow up post. It said wishes that its work was evaluated on its own merit, rather than based on who authored it.
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...