> A "contributor must show they've read the contributing guide" gate (like a small quiz or a required issue link) would filter out 90% of drive-by LLM PRs.

Having a no brown M&Ms rule will only work temporarily.

The LLM can read the guidelines too, after all.

Better might be to move to emailed PRs and ignore github completely. The friction is higher and email addresses are easier to detect and record as spammers than github accounts.

I suspect an LLM would read the instructions more thoroughly than a human.

So if there are only brown M&Ms greeting you in your dressing room, most likely they were put there by a robot.

I see the Van Halen reference you made there.