I totally understand the point of view from maintainers. Review fatigue of low quality slop is a legitimate issue.

The worst ones are fully autonomous AI agents looking for open source projects and adding random pull requests.

But in some cases, I find a legit bug that needs fixing. For example, I want to get a particular program working in Wine/FEX on aarch64 [1], or I find a 12 second hang in Darktable [2]. The problem is that, as a software engineer working in a totally different discipline, I have no knowledge of the low level C code to fully understand what the problem even is, or how to fix it. All I want to do is to fix the issue and help other people avoid running into the same issue. Right now, on my machine, I maintain a set of custom patches to get everything working. But I am too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to create the fix by hand, so I can't submit a pull request (or when I do, I feel really bad about it. I honestly feel like a horrible person, e.g. when a project added a "No AI" policy soon after I submitted some AI-generated PRs [3]). Going forward, I feel like this sort of scenario is going to be way more common.

[1] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/issues/5512

[2] https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/21069

[3] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/commit/8c85096f98084ca9438b16...

Then say all of that in the issue. Say you have a real problem. Say you tried using AI. Add the human element by communicating. I dont think there is a real problem there.

People just want to know you put in the effort, and that you didnt just prompt an AI and hand over completely unchecked slop.