> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have.

ever had a client second guess you by replying you a screenshot from GPT?

ever asked anything in a public group only to have a complete moron replying you with a screenshot from GPT or - at least a bit of effor there - a copy/paste of the wall of text?

no, people have no shame. they have a need for a little bit of (borrowed) self importance and validation.

Which is why i applaud every code of conduct that has public ridicule as punishment for wasting everybody's time

TBH Im not sure if this is a "growing up in a good area" vibe. But over the last decade or so I have had to slowly learn the people around me have no sense of shame. This wasnt their fault, but mine. Society has changed and if you don't adapt you'll end up confused and abused.

I am not saying one has to lose their shame, but at best, understand it.

Keep in mind that many people also contribute to big open source projects just because they believe it will look good ok their CV/GitHub and help them get a job. They don't care about helping anyone, they just want to write "contributed to Ghostty" in their application.

I worked for a major open-source company for half a decade. Everyone thinks their contribution is a gift and you should be grateful. To quote Bo Burnham, "you think your dick is a gift, I promise it's not".

"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have."

And this is one half of why I think

"Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public."

isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.

If you are from poor society you can't afford to have shame. You either succeed or fail, again and again, and keep trying.

It's good to regularly see such policies and discussions around them to remind me how staggeringly shameless some people could be and how many of such people out there. Interacting mostly with my peers, friends, acquaintances I tend to forget that they don't represent average population and after some time I start to assume all people are reasonable and act in good faith.

"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.)

It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.

Shamelessness is very definitely in vogue at the moment. It will pass, let's hope for more than ruins.

You just have to go take a look at what people write in social media, using their real name and photo, to conclude that no, some people have no shame at all.

when it comes to enabling opportunities i dont think it becomes a matter of shame for them anymore. A lot of people (especially in regions where living is tough and competition is fierce) will do anything by hook or crook to get ahead in competition. And if github contributions is a metric for getting hired or getting noticed then you are going to see it become spammed.

To have that shame, you need to know better. If you don’t know any better, having access to a model that can make code and a cursory understanding of the language syntax probably feels like knowing how to write good code. Dunning-Krueger strikes again.

I’ll bet there are probably also people trying to farm accounts with plausible histories for things like anonymous supply chain attacks.

I would imagine there are a lot of "small nice to haves" that people submit because they are frustrated about the mere complexity of submitting changes. Minor things that involve a lot of complexity merely in terms of changing some config or some default etc. Something where there is a significant probability of it being wrong but also a high probability of someone who knows the project being able to quickly see if it's ok or not.

i.e. imagine a change that is literally a small diff, that is easy to describe as a mere user and not a developer, and that requires quite a lot of deep understanding merely to submit as a PR (build the project! run the tests! write the template for the PR!).

Really a lot of this stuff ends up being a kind of failure mode of various projects that we all fall into at some point where "config" is in the code and what could be a simple change and test required a lot of friction.

Obviously not all submissions are going to be like this but I think I've tried a few little ones like that where I would normally just leave whatever annoyance I have alone but think "hey maybe it's 10 min faff with AI and a PR".

The structure of the project incentives kind of creates this. Increasing cost to contribution is a valid strategy of course, but from a holistic project point of view it is not always a good one especially assuming you are not dealing with adversarial contributors but only slightly incompetent ones.

It's nothing but cultural expectations. We need to firewall the West off the rest of the world. Not joking.

I agree with you on the policy being balanced.

However:

> AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.

Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?

According to the marketing[1], the tools are already "smarter than people in many ways". If that is the case, what are these "ways", and why should we trust a human to do a better job at them? If these "ways" keep expanding, which most proponents of this technology believe will happen, then the end state is that the tools are smarter than people at everything, and we shouldn't trust humans to do anything.

Now, clearly, we're not there yet, but where the line is drawn today is extremely fuzzy, and mostly based on opinion. The wildly different narratives around this tech certainly don't help.

[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

I don't think ridicule is an effective threat for people with no shame to begin with.

I've thought about saving my prompts along with project development and even done it by hand a few times, but eventually I realized I don't really get much value from doing so. Are there good reasons to do it?

>I want to see full session transcripts, but we don't have enough tool support for that broadly

I think AI could help with that.

> To me it sounds like "text and code" are free from the controversy surrounding AI-generated media.

It really isn't, don't you recall the "protests" against Microsoft starting to use repositories hosted at GitHub for training their own coding models? Lots of articles and sentiments everywhere at the time.

Seems to have died down though, probably because most developers seemingly at this point use LLMs in some capacity today. Some just use it as a search engine replacement, others to compose snippets they copy-paste and others wholesale don't type code anymore, just instructions then review it.

I'm guessing Ghostty feels like if they'd ban generated text/code, they'd block almost all potential contributors. Not sure I agree with that personally, but I'm guessing that's their perspective.

That's really nice - and fast ui!

Not sure why you are getting downvoted, given that the original site is such a jarringly user-hostile mess.

I never thought of this, you are right. What happens if, let's say, AI generated text/code is "ilegal"? Especially what happens with all the companies that have been using it for their products? Do they need to rollback? It should be a shit show but super interesting to see it unfold...

This only matters if you get sued for copyright violation, though.

>people already working on the project would be better at prompting and steering AI outputs.

In an ideal world sure, but I've seen the entire gamut from amateurs making surprising work to experts whose prompt history looks like a comedy of errors and gotchas. There's some "skill" I can't quite put my finger on when it comes to the way you must speak to an LLM vs another dev. There's more monkey-paw involved in the LLM process, in the sense that you get what you want, but do you want what you'll get?

> It's really as simple. If you or your teammates are producing slop, that's a human and professional problem and these people should be fired.

Agree, slop isn't "the tool is so easy to use I can't review the code I'm producing", slop is the symptom of "I don't care how it's done, as long as it looks correct", and that's been a problem before LLMs too, the difference is how quickly you reach the "slop" state now, not that you have gate your codebase and reject shit code.

As always, most problems in "software programming" isn't about software nor programming but everything around it, including communication and workflows. If your workflow allows people to not be responsible for what they produce, and if allows shitty code to get into production, then that's on you and your team, not on the tools that the individuals use.

I mean this policy only applies to outside contributors and not the maintainers.

> Ghostty is written with plenty of AI assistance, and many maintainers embrace AI tools as a productive tool in their workflow. As a project, we welcome AI as a tool!

> Our reason for the strict AI policy is not due to an anti-AI stance, but instead due to the number of highly unqualified people using AI. It's the people, not the tools, that are the problem.

Basically don't write slop and if you want to contribute as an outsider, ensure your contribution actually is valid and works.

This doesn't work in the age of AI where producing crappy results is much cheaper than verifying them. While this is the case, metadata will be important to understand if you should even bother verifying the results.