> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place.

That doesn't address the controversy because you are a reasonable person assuming that other people using AI are reasonable like you, and know how to use AI correctly.

The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work.

In general, a good policy towards AI submission really has to primarily address the "good faith" issue; and then explain how much tolerance the project has for vibecoding.

>other people are reasonable like you

No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them".

AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare on the internet, specifically the global internet, because with some of these actors you have zero recourse. AI moved this from moderately drowning in crap to being crushed under an ocean of it.

Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.

> The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work.

"Open source" does not mean "open contribution", i.e. just because the software is open source does not imply that your contribution (or in particular a not-high-effort contribution) is welcome.

A well-known application that is open source in the strictest sense, but not open contribution is SQLite.

I see the solution as only engaging with reasonable persons and ignore the rest.

And the problem is filtering them out. That is real work that can be draining and demoralizing as unreasonable persons usually have their sad story why they are the way they are, but you cannot do therapy or coaching for random strangers while trying to get a project going.

So if people contribute good things, engage with them. If they contribute slob (AI generated or not) - you say no to them.

> The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish.

There's a way to handle this: put an automatic AI review of every PR from new contributors. Fight fire with fire.

(Actually, this was the solution for spam even before LLMs. See "A plan for SPAM" by Paul Graham. Basically, if you have a cheap but accurate filter (specially, a filter you can train for your own patterns), it should be enabled as a first line of defense. Anything the filter doesn't catch and the user had to manually mark as spam should become data to improve the filter)

Moreover, if the review detects LLM-generated content but the user didn't disclose it, maybe there should be consequences

How is an AI policy going to help prevent bad faith actors, though?

People who are doing those harmful things with AI aren’t going to stop because of a policy. They are just going to lie and not admit their submissions are AI generated.

At that point, you will still have to review the code and reject it if it is bad quality, just like you had to without an AI policy. The policy doesn’t make it any easier to filter out the bad faith AI submissions.

In fact, if we DO develop an efficient way to weed out the bad faith PRs that lie about using AI, then why do we need the policy at all? Just use that same system to weed out the bad submissions, and just skip the policy completely.

The curl project is proof of this. No rumors

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