Comment by lelanthran
5 days ago
> Back when I ran a WoW guild, the first sentence in our recruitment post emphasized the importance of reading the whole post (because the way to access the application form was to click the only smiley in the post, and this detail was mentioned in the last paragraph).
I mentioned the "no brown M&Ms rule" in a recent comment, and someone pointed out to me that this is more likely to by adhered to by an LLM - humans might miss a single line in a three pages of text, but the LLM won't.
I am starting to think that a better approach might be to move to mailing lists; this means that valuable drive-by PRs (like I did in the past) are going to be unintended victims by preventing all drive-by PRs, because the friction is too high. Submitted needs to have an email address, make sure it isn't marked as spam, sign up to the mailing list, email their PR, wait for a response, etc.
The upside is that projects can start marking that email address as spam if it submits AI slop. The downside is that actually valuable drive-by PRs will be a thing of the past.
I wonder if you could take advantage of the fact that the LLM is more likely to follow instructions that humans might miss. For example include instructions somewhere in the repo that says you must use a certain phrase in all pull requests, and then you just check the PR for that phrase.
Or maybe require the PR to contain something that is generated by running code, which the LLM may not be able to do without some effort on the user's part.