I think some folks genuinely don’t realize how selfish and destructive they’re being or at least believe they help more than they hinder. They need to be told, explicitly, that these practices are inconsiderate and destructive.

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jerf 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We need to develop some ethics, or at least, "community standards" (as they may vary significantly between different use cases) around the some of the things this essay talks about. I know I've really been pondering the mismatch between human attention and the ability of LLMs to generate things that consume human attention.

We are still mostly running on inertia where a PR required a certain amount of human attention to generate 500 lines of proposed changes, and even then, nothing stops such PR from being garbage. But at least the rate at which such garbage PRs was bounded by the rate at which you had that very specific level of developer that was A: capable of writing 500 lines of diffs in the first place but B: didn't realize these particular 500 lines is a bad idea. Certainly not an empty set, but also certainly much more restricted than "everyone with the ability to set up a code bot and type something".

Code used to be rare, and therefore, worth a lot. Now it's not rare. 1500 lines of 2026 code is not the same as 1500 lines of 2006 code. The ceiling of the value of a contribution is in how much work the user put it and how high quality the work is. If "the work the user put in" is 30 seconds typing a prompt, that's the value, no matter how many lines of code some AI expanded that into. I'd honestly rather have an Issue filed with your proposed prompt in it than the actual output of your AI, if that's all you're going to put into the PR. There's a lot of things I can do with that prompt that may make it better but it's way harder to do that with the code.

You know, stuff like that. That might actually be a useful counter to some of these slop posts, especially things that are something that may be a good idea but need someone to treat the prompt itself as a starting point rather than the code. Maybe that's a decent response that's somewhat less hostile; close out these PRs with a request to file an Issue with the prompt instead.

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phyzome 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've yet to see a slopper show any kind of shame.

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Forgeties79 15 hours ago | parent [-]

I see plenty of well meaning people use ChatGPT and think they’re being helpful. You’re better off with patience and polite explanation than assuming they’re all cynical/selfish assholes trying to cut corners. Some people just get excited and don’t really think about what they’re doing. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but you should at least try to explain it to them once. Never know when you might educate someone.

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phyzome 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've seen a variety of approaches used (I'm not usually the one doing the confronting) but I still haven't seen any shame, etc. Which is weird, because it's not like it's one monolithic group? But it's still what I've seen.

It might be that people have their change of heart more privately, of course.

	▲	Forgeties79 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What are you expecting? Someone to go on the Internet and apologize or otherwise express their genuine shame and desire to change?

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Larrikin 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you can both be right. Someone posting their first slop PR deserves a different response than the spammers.

Unless they lie about it.

	▲	Forgeties79 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. Set up guardrails to protect your repos, clearly communicate rules, etc. If someone is a problem, you show them the door.

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scuff3d 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Somewhere there is a discord full of vibe coders crying to each other that people won't let them contribute to open source projects.