Comment by silverwind
7 hours ago
PR spam is a major problems for repo that run bounties. Maybe GitHub should temporarily block accounts from raising PRs if like 95%+ of them are getting rejected.
7 hours ago
PR spam is a major problems for repo that run bounties. Maybe GitHub should temporarily block accounts from raising PRs if like 95%+ of them are getting rejected.
I feel like GitHub should have a system where you can give out tokens that are valid for e.g. 1 PR. If someone shows to engage in meaningful discussion and has a good idea to address an issue/feature, you initially give them one PR token. If the PR is of good quality, you can give them a few more, until they are contributors that can just create PRs as they like.
A similar system would be nice for issues, though I'm not sure what it'd look like if issues are the springboard for contributing PRs.
Not likely to ever happen (as others said), GitHub/MS want to sell CoPilot subscriptions/tokens and LLM-generated PRs are a part of that business model.
You could use a "OTP" to provide this: give out tokens ("OTP"), anyone with that token can submit, keep a record of the user (eg github username, email address) and token, run a bot to delete submissions that don't have a valid token, check the token+user pair, if there is a mismatch blacklist the user that token was given to whilst removing the PR.
My community does something vaguely similar, where you get credit for having bugfix PRs merged, and it's deducted when you get feature PRs merged.
GitHub has not incentive for blocking AI. It's like asking an ad company to build an adblocker into their browser.
It's called Brave
Which is not chrome and still has ads...(Ironically).
The issue here is the core model is broken (misaligned incentives). That's not something you are going to fix with a github "downstream". A token system could help but it's easy to imagine ways that could be gamed, if not implemented well.
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GitHub and Microsoft are actively contributing to the problem, why would they admit fault?
Problem is the bots can create any number of github accounts and continue spamming. Though this would be a good simple defense to start with.
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