On a tangent: the origin of the problems with low-quality drive-by requests is github's social nature. That might have been great when GitHub started, but nowadays many use it as portfolio padding and/or social proof.

"This person contributed to a lot of projects" heuristic for "they're a good and passionate developer" means people will increasingly game this using low-quality submissions. This has been happening for years already.

Of course, AI just added kerosene to the fire, but re-read the policy and omit AI and it still makes sense!

A long term fix for this is to remove the incentive. Paradoxically, AI might help here because this can so trivially be gamed that it's obvious it's not longer any kind of signal.

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stephantul 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Your point about rereading without ai makes so much sense.

The economics of it have changed, human nature hasn’t. Before 2023 (?) people also submitted garbage PRs just to be able to add “contributed to X” to their CV. It’s just become a lot cheaper.

	▲	TeMPOraL 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Let's not forget the Hacktober Fest, the scourge of open source for over a decade now, the driver of low-quality "contribution" spam by hordes of people doing it for a goddamn free t-shirt. No, this problem isn't fundamentally about AI, it's about "social" structure of Github and incentives it creates (fame, employment).