this highlights the saddest thing about this whole generative ai thing. beforehand, there was opportunity to learn, deliver and prove oneself outside of classical social organization. now that's all going to go away and everyone is going to fall back on credentials and social standing. what an incredible shame for social mobility and those who for one reason or another don't fit in with traditional structures.

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senko 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The origin of the problems with low-quality drive-by requests is github's social nature[0]. AI doesn't help, but it's not the cause.

I've seen my share of zero-effort drive-by "contributions" so people can pad their GH profile, long before AI, on tiny obscure projects I have published there: larger and more prominent projects have always been spammed.

If anything, the AI-enabled flood will force the reckoning that was long time coming.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731646

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boltzmann-brain 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Vouch is a good quick fix, but it has some properties that can lead to collapsed states, discussed in the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811

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a-dub 2 hours ago | parent [-]

it's also going to kill the open web. nobody is going to want to share their ideas or code publicly anymore. with the natural barriers gone, the incentives to share will go to zero. everything will happen behind closed doors.

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tolerance 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You could argue that this could increase output to the open web: outsiders still need a place to clout chase.

	▲	boltzmann-brain 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		GitHub has never been a good method of clout chasing. in decades of being in this industry, I've seen < 1% of potential employers care about FLOSS contributions, as long as you have some stuff on your GH.

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patcon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel this is a bit too pessimistic. For example, people can make tutorials that auto-certify in vouch. Or others can write agent skills that share etiquette, which agents must demonstrate usage of before PRs can be created.

Yes, there's room for deception, but this is mostly about superhuman skills and newcomer ignorance and a new eternal September that we'll surely figure out

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potsandpans 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> that's all going to go away and everyone is going to fall back on credentials and social standing.

Only if you allow people like this to normalize it.

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yencabulator 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

.. all revolving around a proprietary Microsoft service.

Support Microsoft or be socially shunned?

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mitchellh 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Vouch is forge-agnostic. See the 2nd paragraph in the README:

> The implementation is generic and can be used by any project on any code forge, but we provide GitHub integration out of the box via GitHub actions and the CLI.

And then see the trust format which allows for a platform tag. There isn't even a default-GitHub approach, just the GitHub actions default to GitHub via `--default-platform` flag (which makes sense cause they're being invoked ON GITHUB).

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yencabulator 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Define "platform".

So I can choose from github, gitlab or maybe codeberg? What about self-hosters, with project-specific forges? What about the fact that I have an account on multiple forges, that are all me?

This seems to be overly biased toward centralized services, which means it's just serving to further re-enforce Microsoft's dominance.

	▲	mitchellh 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a text string, platform can be anything you want, then use the vouch CLI (or parse it yourself) to do whatever you want. We don't do identity mapping, because cross-forge projects are rare and maintaining that would centralize the system and its not what we're trying to do. The whole thing is explicitly decentralized with tiny, community specific networks that you build up.

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potsandpans an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I would rather stop contributing to open source rather than interact with your gatekeeping social experiment.

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cyanydeez 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

argueably, the years 2015-2020, we should have gone back to social standing.

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bicx 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I guess you could say the same about a lot of craft- or skill-based professions that ultimately got heavily automated.

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siva7 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It also marks the end of the open source movement as the value of source code has lost any meaning with vibe coding and ai.