>People spamming Open Source repos with AI PRs aren't trying to help Open Source, they're trying to build a brand

I am certain many of them honestly believe that they are doing the right thing and that they are helping. After all hey, they implemented a feature or fixed a bug for the community! It's a grim worldview if you think they are all just selfish.

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mlyle 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's not like this must be exclusively A or B.

The high school kid who volunteers at a homeless shelter and hopes it will help their college app is likely doing it both out of altruism and self-interest.

(Actually, the person who helps people because it feels good is also acting out of self-interest).

Given many ways to be altruistic, people will usually pick the ones that coincide more with their self interest. And in turn, self interest can warp a lot of the outcomes, even if people are trying to help.

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Larrikin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would argue this is naive and there's very little evidence to support this opinion other than just wishing it was true.

It may happen on smaller projects with few users but not in meaningful large projects.

	▲	janalsncm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> there's very little evidence to support this opinion other than just wishing it was true Building a brand doesn’t require submitting to someone else’s open source project. You can do the same thing by creating your own OSS project. For a lot of them it’s probably a little of column A and a little of column B. If people are submitting in their real name it’s more likely they’re building a brand. I also think it’s possible for someone to genuinely think they are helping without trying to build reputation.

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thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah. I'm sure some (maybe a lot?) are for selfish reasons, but there is also a pretty large section of users who have always wanted to contribute, help out, or make some features in their favorite projects and just never had the skill or opportunity to do so and see LLMs as a way for them to final actualize that desire.

Think about it from the perspective of a non-programmer, or even total non-technical person. Vibe coding to someone like that looks like complete magic. Suddenly to that person, a whole new world has opened up. Ideas, features, bug fixes they've always wanted but could never do now look possible. That particular group of people don't see it as spamming the maintainer, they genuinely feel like they're finally able to help.

	▲	Exoristos an hour ago \| parent [-]
		So they're not just selfish, but delusional.

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parliament32 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They're stuck in this idea that somehow they're better at prompting the slop generator than anyone else, therefore they're helpful and people definitely want their output merged in to these various projects. They will have trouble understanding that their personal contribution to the whole process is somewhere between negligible and harmful, and simply donating those tokens to a maintainer who is actually aware of how the codebase works and where all the skeletons are is a much better proposition.

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dormento an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> they implemented a feature or fixed a bug for the community!

yeah but, did they really?

All IMHO of course, but:

If they understand what they did, it follows that they understand someone has to approve/disapprove that contribution for it to land in the repo, and therefore, size their contributions accordingly to make reviewers lives easier.

If they do not understand what they did, they should not be attempting to land high-value high-complexity contributions yet; they should start with something smaller precisely so they can learn.

Edit: I realize I probably sound too grumpy about it, its just that they could be doing it in their own project, in their own repo, where they're free to go for anything they are comfortable with.