I think every maintainer should be able to say how they want or don't want others to contribute.

But i feel like it was always true that patches from the internet at large were largely more trouble then they were worth most of the time. The reason people accept them is not for the sake of the patch itself but because that is how you get new contributors who eventually become useful.

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jcims 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> But i feel like it was always true that patches from the internet at large were largely more trouble then they were worth most of the time.

Oh god, I needed to add a feature to an open source project (kind of a freemium project) about fifteen years ago. I had no experience with professional software development nor did I have any understanding of pull requests. I sent one over after explaining what I was trying to do and that I thought it would be a good feature for the project.

Now they probably shouldn’t have just blindly merged it, but they did, and it really made a mess.

Learned a valuable lesson that day haha.

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em-bee 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

curious, what happened, and what did you learn?

if they merge something blindly, then it's really on them if it makes a mess.

	▲	jcims 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If I recall correctly I sent the PR as just a way to ship a blob of code, intending to use it to demo a specific UI feature that I wanted them to look at. Meanwhile I was tinkering with the schema in the database and messing about deep in the guts of the software. I didn't really know how to separate the two so I just shipped the whole PR thinking they would just run it on the side to demo the thing I was talking to them about. Well they just deployed it to their production instance and fucked everything up on their end. I recall being horrified when I was tinkering with their customer-facing instance and seeing evidence of the other work I was doing. I immediately emailed them and said whoa whoa whoa. xD Found the email that I sent to the founder, from 2014: >It looked like <redacted> may have got a few surprises in the code she merged from the 2.1M1br branch yesterday. I've just been committing basically all the tinkering i do to that branch, so it may have a few landmines in it. >Hope i didn't create any headaches for anyone. Sorry!

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bawolff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, that sounds more like you were setup to fail.

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akdev1l 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the author of the article is missing this point.

When you actually work alongside people and everyone builds a similar mental model of the codebase then communication between humans is far more effective than LLMs.

For random contributions then this doesn’t apply