> Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the code contributions, but also massively impact the other, non-tangible contributions like ideas, eyes on code, etc. That feels way worse.

These "contributions", while they did exist in small quantities, mostly were not actually what you've described there.

Instead, those boiled down to unsolicited opinions, hostile takeover attempts, value extraction, general drama and just overall overhead over simply building code.

This was not always the case, but the GitHub model of building FOSS (and removal of all friction) certainly made it the new default.

Said model was always unsustainable, but the burn rate made it sustainable enough so that we could just throw more humans at the problem to replace the burnt-out ones.

AI pushed the burn rate over the replacement rate.

=> We will likely see more projects adapt this or a similar stance I think.

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hombre_fatal 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It always seemed like a weird default to let people (esp strangers) submit PRs that weren't tied to an issue nor approved.

What do you mean you just spent a week implementing something in secret?

AI makes it extra silly because now you can craft up your unsolicited code change in minutes, making it extra obvious that code changes should spawn from real discussion and agreement.

TFA is part of looking for new processes that actually work. Dunno why people are having such rose tinted glasses about pull requests. Open an issue, talk to people. Have an idea? Then get people to cosign it.

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robryan 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it was different pre-AI. Someone might come in and spend days getting some understanding of the codebase before they contribute some minor fix. Over time they might stick around a make some more of these, progressively gaining trust so when they do take on something bigger the maintainers will know they aren't wasting their time reviewing it.

Now they can drop a multi thousand line poorly understood PR day 1.

	▲	embedding-shape 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As someone who maintained FOSS libraries pre-AI, I think the frequency might have changed, but large drive-by PRs with thousands of changes happened before too, I've been on the receiving end of those many times. Usually they fundamentally change the architecture too, then the submitter get offended/sad/surprised when you tell them you impossibly could accept it and they should stop wasting their time contributing without discussing first. Usually ends with some threats how their fork will take all the contributors or something like that. What I don't get, is why these LLM users aren't asking their LLM for how to contribute and how the project prefers to contribute, and how they can make sure it's accepted? Literally, the very same tools they use to code, can be used to make sure their PR follows all guidelines, from discussions to acceptance of the PR itself, it's right there, they literally just have to prompt for it! Such a lazy group of people.

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arzig 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Good faith PRs were also suffering under the current model. Ive opened PRs by hand on small projects to try and fix personal issues that probably affected others. Then the PRs languish for months or in one case literal years under the deluge of ai slop being spammed at the repo. I’m not going to ping the maintainers constantly when I know they are struggling so I’m left running my fork and no one else gets the benefit.

	▲	hombre_fatal 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Big projects pre-AI also can have hundreds of rotting PRs. It's a lot of work to go through them, and unsolicited PRs are kind of the wrong way to spend time as a maintainer. AI just makes it so obvious how bad of a process it is that we can't ignore it anymore, and now we need to finally figure out good processes. Even little stuff like: I've created issues on the Claude Code github that got agreement and then led to code changes. Why isn't there a default, built-in way for my issues to rise above the zero-effort chaff? If you finally do the work of vetting someone's PR, why isn't there a built-in (hidden) way to +1 someone so we can see that they have some reputation with the project on their future issues/PRs?

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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