Comment by SpicyLemonZest
1 day ago
You should not be weeding out bad PRs regardless of their source! A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author; bad PRs from a human author often mean things such as "I'd like to learn how this works and join your community". So it can be both satisfying and worthwhile to spend your effort on cleaning it up, even if it starts to take as much or even more effort than doing it yourself would have.
You're not the first person I've seen argue that authorship doesn't matter, so I don't want to blame you for it, but I really don't understand where that idea is coming from. To me it seems obviously wrong.
> You should not be weeding out bad PRs regardless of their source! A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author; bad PRs from a human author often mean things such as "I'd like to learn how this works and join your community".
I think the difference in perspective might come from the fact that to many people the code and features matters more than any community or the idea of participating in it. If it works, it works.
Or maybe they’re not even indifferent about the community, just upset at people throwing away working code.
The Godot maintainers have decided they don't support that perspective. In their words, they value "being cautious about feature creep" and "dedicated to high code quality"; they don't accept that all working code should be merged.
Aspiring contributors who'd like to make a different tradeoff are of course free to make a fork. But then all of the stuff in their fork won't benefit from the participation of the community, which I suspect most such people do value even if they identify as a "code first" person.
> they don't accept that all working code should be merged.
That’s perfectly within their rights to do!
> Aspiring contributors who'd like to make a different tradeoff are of course free to make a fork.
Too many of those do fragment the development effort and hurt any project.
Here’s hoping that Godot doesn’t struggle too much with people who don’t care about their rules and spam PRs regardless and that the people who want to commit AI code regardless because it works and is good in their eyes at least demonstrate enough initiative to cheat convincingly (maybe actually read the code and make it their own). Godot is a pretty cool project!
Wonder what the middle ground would look like - a project with super high test coverage and tooling, that also requires at least 20 USD in Opus tokens spent on review on the behalf of the author or something, before an actual human being is bothered with it? Heh.
> A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author;
Says who? How can you say I'm categorically wrong when your entire point rests upon an opinion?
Says the definition? I don't really understand your response. A pull request is a request from Alice (the author) that one of Barbara, Chris, Daniel (the maintainers) should pull her code into a particular branch.
Many communities do have a norm that all authors are to be presumed equal, as long as they're prepared to take advice and learn from it. (That's where all experts start, after all.) That's the norm that Godot are trying to protect here. If they don't stop accepting AI-authored contributions, they worry, reviewers will start to implicitly load-shed by not reading PRs from people they don't recognize.
A social contract? You invented that out of thin air. They're a means to an end not some discussion on philosophy.
So you can run your project that way.
You don't get to dictate that other people run their projects that way.
> A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author
...and the project to which it is submitted.
SpicyLemonZest is not the sole arbiter of what PRs mean and stand for.
I was explaining why the Godot maintainers have chosen to enact the policy described in the source article, in response to a comment saying that they should not have enacted it. I don't understand why you think I'm dictating or arbitrating anything.