Comment by 202508042147
3 days ago
I am an OSS maintainer and I can tell you the job is terrible. Not because of the thankless work (I am sponsored by a corp for the work) but because we're still allowing public PRs. Plenty of people that "want to help" just push walls of text and code and 2 days later ask why hasn't their contribution been accepted yet. And when will it be? Because they need it ASAP!
"Closing as too broad / not focused enough in language and scope / not adhering to our PR submission guidelines (see [link])"
(where the top guideline on [link] clearly states: "we do not accept submissions that are either outright AI-generated or conceptually similar in terms of style, verbosity, generality, scope-creep or signal-to-noise ratio")
I wish I could to this, but the project does not belong to me. I am the main maintainer and probably could push for this, but the higher ups are all in on AI and wouldn't like it at all.
Ouch, this seems like you’re really stuck in a hard place. You own most of the responsibility but can’t make any decisions.
I think the most likely outcome is that you’re ultimately going to reach the conclusion that the best option is to leave.
Do higher ups actually read contribution policy on a public repo?
If you are not paid to work on it you can just ignore those.
You still have to read it to determine you can ignore it
You can also ignore it without reading it.
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Meanwhile just a few minutes ago in an issue on a project not mine, I just wrote a simple 3 step set of directions answering another users problem. (how to get the Voice audiobook app to appear in Android Auto when installed from Fdroid instead of google play.)
He takes that, tells claude to add it to his docs, claude mangles my correct manually written directions and spits out a garbled and nonsensical version, and the project owner just throws that right into his docs.
Like where do you go from there? Even when you don't use any ai someone else just uses it upon you. It's like a bizarre new form of Bowdlerization.
Everyone sucks on all sides as far as I can tell. I really don't understand why people are accepting this paradigm of using ais for everything. Is everyone really that incapable of resisting the whatever it is you get from giving orders that they don't even care what results from the orders, just make me feel like I caused a lot of stuff to happen.
This is all so self-inflicted too.