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  • I also maintain a popular open source repo and have seen similar. If I receive a low effort single-pass obviously-Clauded PR (many people (agents) don’t even bother using the AGENTS.md file I provide right in the repo?!) with no associated issue I also have no qualms closing. I do generally leave a short note about why I closed (volume of these is around 5/week) showing how far off they (Claude) was and encourage opening an issue where we can start a discussion which rarely happens for the drive-by folks. So I totally feel this but I find myself more disheartened by the practice than angry. It feels like slowly watching open-source go the way of email. Open and free until no-cost spam ruined the inbox for everyone...
    by J253
  • This makes sense. Apart from the original thing, I no longer upstream anything. It just takes comparatively more effort than maintaining a private fork with my own idiosyncratic fix. This must mean that even small fixes that non-contributors would make in the past are just happening off the books, so to speak. e.g. I upstreamed a tiny fix to Thrift codegen because some function could be much faster. These days I wouldn't bother. I'd just fork and leave upstream to be upstream.

    I suspect many people are like me since it feels like a very normie position to take. That means that contributors are even more likely to be useful because both the drive-by genuine contributors have chosen otherwise and these contributors have increased.

    It must be quite painful to be an open source maintainer right now. One wonders what to make of such projects in a future where a feature-list is a sufficient prompt.

    by arjie
  • I’ve heard about similar issues with Hacktoberfest’s T-shirts back in 2020, but it was not as automated back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
    by yeputons
  • I think the author meant 'burnish' there, which is a clever way of showing they didn't use AI :-)
    by ChuckMcM
  • Hi Neil, fun to see you on HN. I agree with your points and I you summarized it very well as "Ultimately, open source is built on trust".

    AI is destroying trust in open source and many other areas and I think this will discourage teams from publishing their source code in the future.

    On the other hand, personal connections are becoming even more important, which is unfair to the younger generation and people who don't live near tech hubs.

    by timokoesters
  • So the fixes are still fixes, but we (I am also a OSS maintainer) are unwilling to accept them as they boost the contributor’s status where we think the merit is very or extremely limited.

    Why not have these PRs counted differently (by the platform), and/or colored differently in the timeline(s) thus made less visible or more clear?

    by smooc
  • IMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone.

    Actually, if I see someone doing open source like it's a performative career checkbox, that will not be positive signal, and could easily be negative. I understand that people will do what they need to do to get a job, but that pragmatic career checkboxing itself isn't positive. I will have to look for positive signal elsewhere for that person.

    The problem is that our industry has gotten very bad at hiring, and now we have everyone playing all sorts of games with it -- rehearsing Leetcode interviews, bad faith open source contributions, feigning enthusiasm, spamming AI-tweaked resumes, outright cheating on interviews -- rather than focusing on doing good work, and being part of a team.

    If you're involved in hiring, and you care about effectiveness and culture, consider pushing back against the prevailing dysfunctional big-corporate-cattle-herding practices. Especially if your company has no excuse to be big-corporate dysfunctional, and can't afford to be.

    by neilv
  • Ironically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the project".

    Automated PR's can have automated responses. You make a human effort, you get a human response.

    by alkonaut

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