If you're maintaining OSS, that's understandable, and you're free to say no, but in the corporate world, that's not realistic, AI is here to stay, if they don't harness it they would just be left behind. even if the AI gets good and stops writing sloppy stuff, it's still gonna write a lot of stuff, and you're gonna review it anyway, and take responsibility and ownership, and it's still gonna take you more time, because the bottleneck is now reviewing and understanding the code.

I agree that the workflow is broken, but only on the reviewing side, AI is a tool we use to make products just like any other we used in the past, punch cards, machine code, assembly, ...etc. AI is just the new tool that sits on top of the code as the next level, no one codes with punch cards, no one writes machine code anymore, we used to write the compiled language and don't care about how it's compiled or turned into machine code, same with AI, although it's not there yet and still requires babysitting by engineers, but that's our new job now, and we need to learn how to use it and make our lifes easier.

> Just had a thought, what if you made new contributors write a human-authored essay on why they’re submitting a patch, and then check it against Pangram?

The problem is writing such an essay takes magnitudes more of an effort for people who are not native English (or whatever the language is in which discussions are done about the project) speakers.

Also, relatedly, essays written by non-native English speakers often get considered to be AI-written by common AI detection systems, even though no AI was involved when writing them; see for example

> I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

> https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...

Anecdotally, as someone who's been starting to get more and more agent-only/driven PRs, a good amount of the time it's by an account with little to no activity until one day they suddenly start doing 50-100+ PRs a _day_ on entirely unrelated projects... you can kind of guess what they're doing.

As for motive, it probably varies, though some will loudly put that they're some agent manager or something with lots of contributions, so you can guess their motivations there.

In other cases, these are instrad brand-new accounts which is a related but I guess slightly different story... not gonna say these are spam bot accounts being juiced with fake activity but well...

There was this attempt (attack?) on Fedora in June: https://lwn.net/Articles/1077035/

If you have little experience writing code, do you know that you actually understand what you’re reading though?

For example could you reproduce the code you read immediately after writing it?

It’s very easy to “read code” if you’re just reading for surface level understanding.

If it's easier for you to convert written code into mental models than the other way around, you are either a incredible smart and skilled person and a good programmer and should be able to convert that into a job and money easily, or you can't really write code at all.