The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroughly tested and reviewed pieces of code I have ever written. I just really, really don't want to bother someone with low quality "help" who graciously offers their time to work on open source stuff.

Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I've definitely been caught off guard by it.

It's because a lot of people that werent skilful werent on your path before. Now that pandora's box has been re-opened, those people feel "they get a second chance at life". It's not that they have no shame, they have no perspective to put that shame.

You on the other hand, have for many years honed your craft. The more you learn, the more you discover to learn aka , you realize how little you know. They don't have this. _At all_. They see this as a "free ticket to the front row" and when we politely push back (we should be way harsher in this, its the only language they understand) all they hear is "he doesn't like _me_." which is an escape.

You know how much work you ask of me, when you open a PR on my project, they don't. They will just see it as "why don't you let me join, since I have AI I should have the same skill as you".... unironically.

In other words, these "other people" that we talk about haven't worked a day in the field in their life, so they simply don't understand much of it, however they feel they understand everything of it.

> 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

Some people just want their name in the contributor list, whether it's for ego, to build a portfolio, etc. I think that's what it comes down to. Many projects, especially high profile ones, have to deal with low effort contributions - correcting spelling mistakes, reformatting code, etc. It's been going on for a long time. The Linux contributor guidelines - probably a lot of other projects too - specifically call this stuff out and caution people not to do it lest they suffer the wrath of the LKML. AI coding tools open up all kinds of new possibilities for these types of contributors, but it's not AI that's the problem.

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.

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

My guess is it's mostly people from countries with a culture that reward shameless behavior.

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.

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".

Kind of by definition we will not see the people who do not submit frivolous PRs that waste the time of other people. So keep in mind that there's likely a huge amount of survivor bias involved.

Just like with email spam I would expect that a big part of the issue is that it only takes a minority of shameless people to create a ton of contribution spam. Unlike email spam these people actually want their contributions to be tied to their personal reputation. Which in theory means that it should be easier to identify and isolate them.

A subset of open source contributors are only interested in getting something accepted so they can put it on their resume.

Any smart interviewer knows that you have to look at actual code of the contributions to confirm it was actually accepted and that it was a non-trivial change (e.g. not updating punctuation in the README or something).

In my experience this is where the PR-spammers fall apart in interviews. When they proudly tell you they’re a contributor to a dozen popular projects and you ask for direct links to their contributions, they start coming up with excuses for why they can’t find them or their story changes.

There are of course lazy interviewers who will see the resume line about having contributed to popular projects and take it as strong signal without second guessing. That’s what these people are counting on.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all.

I think this is interesting too. I've noticed the difference in dating/hook-up contexts. The people you're talking about also end up getting laid more but that group also has a very large intersection with sex pests and other shitty people. The thing they have in common though is that they just don't care what other people think about them. That leads some of them to be successful if they are otherwise good people... or to become borderline or actual crininals if not. I find it fascinating actually, like how does this difference come about and can it actually be changed or is it something we get early in life or from the genetic lottery.

The major companies that made available the very tools they use to create this spam code, applied the exact same ethics.

I'm not surprised. Lower barrier of entry -- thanks to AI in this case -- often leads to a decrease in quality in most things.

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

Lots of people cosplay as developers, and "contributing" to open source is a box they must check. It's like they go through the moves without understanding they're doing the opposite of what they should be doing. Same with having a tech blog, they don't understand that the end goal is not "having a blog" but "producing and sharing quality content"

The Internet (and developer communities) used to be a high trust society - mostly academics and developers, everyone with shared experiences of learning when it was harder to get resources, etc.

The grift culture has changed that completely, now students face a lot of pressure to spam out PRs just to show they have contributed something.

It's because the AI is generating code better than they would write, and if you don't like it then that's fine... they didn't write it

it's easy to not have shame when you have no skin in the game... this is similar to how narcissists think so highly of themselves, it's never their fault

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.

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

"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.