Every hobby at some point turns into an exclusive, invitation-only club in order to maintain the quality of each individual's contribution, but then old members start to literally die and they're left wondering why the hobby died too. I feel like most people don't understand that any organization that wants to grow needs to sacrifice quality in order to attract new members.

  > Have you ever contributed to a very large project like LLVM?

  > I would say clearly not from the comment.

  > It’s not so small that you can get everything in your head with only a reading.

So, after reading code, one should write down what made him amazed and find out why it is so - whether it is a custom of a project or a peculiarity of code just read.

I actually have such a list for my work. Do you?

  > You need to actually engage with the code via contributions to understand it. 100+ comments is not an exceptional amount for early contributions.

That PR we discuss here contains a maintainer's requirement to remove excessive commenting - PR's author definitely did not do a codebase style matching cleanup job on his code before submission.

I agree with more review. The reason I wrote the PR is because AI keeps using `int` in my codebase when modern coding guidelines suggest `size_t`, `uint32_t`, or something else modern.

Disclosing that you used AI three days after making the PR, after 4 people had already commented on your code, doesn't sit right with me. That's the kind of thing that should be disclosed in the original PR message. Especially so if you are not confident in the generated code

I’ll grant you that, but at least a new contributor who actually writes the code they contribute has offered some level of reciprocity with respect to the time it takes to review their contributions.

Trying to understand a problem and taking some time to work out a solution proves that you’re actually trying to learn and be helpful, even if you’re green. Using a LLM to generate a nearly-thousand-line PR and yeeting it at the maintainers with a note that says “I don’t really know what this does” feels less hopeful.

I feel like a better use of an LLM would be to use it for guidance on where to look when trying to see how pieces fit together, or maybe get some understanding of what something is doing, and then by one’s own efforts actually construct the solution. Then, even if one only has a partial implementation, it would feel much more reasonable to open a WIP PR and say “is this on the right track?”

Not getting thousand line AI slop PRs from resume builders who are looking for a "LLVM contributor" bullet point before moving on is a net positive. Lack of such contributors is a feature, not a bug.

And you can't go and turn this around into "but the gate keeping!" You just said that expecting someone to learn and be an asset to a project is entitlement, so by definition someone with this attitude won't stick around.

Lastly, the reason that the resume builder wants the "LLVM contributor" bullet point in the first place is precisely because that normally takes effort. If it becomes known in the industry that getting it simply requires throwing some AI PR over the wall - the value of this signal will quickly diminish.