They invited AI in by creating a comprehensive list of instructions for AI agents - in the README, in a context.md, and even as yarn scripts. What did they expect?

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steveruizok 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hey, Steve from tldraw here. We use AI tools to develop tldraw. The tools are not the problem, they're just changing the fundamentals (e.g. a well-formed PR is no longer a sign of thoughtful engagement, a large PR shows more effort than a small PR, etc) and accelerating other latent issues in contribution.

About the README etc: we ship an SDK and a lot of people use our source code as docs or a prototyping environment. I think a lot about agents as consumers of the codebase and I want help them navigate the monorepo quickly. That said, I'm not sure if the CONTEXT.md system I made for tldraw is actually that useful... new models are good at finding their way around and I also worry that we don't update them enough. I've found that bad directions are worse than no directions over time.

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stavros 6 hours ago | parent [-]

This is my experience as well. I work with AI agents a lot, they are very useful. What's not useful is some passer-by telling the AI "implement <my favorite feature>" and then sending that as a PR. I could have written a sentence to the LLM too if I wanted to, you aren't really giving me or the project any value by doing that.

Now that writing the code is the easy part, we're just going to transition to having very few contributors, who are needed for their architectural skills, product vision, reasoned thinking, etc, rather than pure code-writing.

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account42 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Outside contributors have never been valuable as pure code monkeys.

	▲	stavros 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I disagree, when code took hours to write, it was very useful to have someone drive by and fix a bug for you. Now, all that does is it saves you five minutes of LLM crunching.

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ggbaker 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The CONTEXT.md file was created 5 months ago, and the contribution policy changed today. I would interpret that as a good-faith attempt to work with AI agents, which with some experience, didn't work as well as they hoped.

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embedding-shape 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wouldn't that be for their usage? It's presence doesn't implicitly mean they want incomplete PRs submitted to their repository constantly.

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Seattle3503 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I still find it useful to vibe code in a private fork. For example with yt-dlp its now super easy to add a website with Claude for personal use, but that doesn't mean it's appropriate to open a PR.