The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle?

Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct?

I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?

Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”. The original authors have no idea what their agents are writing, these are mostly badly quality models (people doing this are not only cutting corners, but also using the less amount of money/tokens to do so). If the agent creates 200, 400 or whatever PRs and get 5 in the agent is still “winning” for the person instructing it. The maintainers though have to filter these out on the other side. A common case is a fix to something that was already fixed simply because the agent worked on old code assumptions.

Well historically the consensus was that it was harder to read code than to write it, but that leads to uncomfortable conclusions these days, so that bit of common wisdom has mostly been ejected.

> I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?

I’m not trying to be mean, but this comment is basically “I have no experience with this topic, but it can just be boiled down to this one simple question right?”

It's a well-known trope, that it's harder to read code than to write it, and review is more complicated than to read it, so I do not understand what you want to imply?

> The question becomes [...]

"A question is...". To my mind not the most important question, if one plays-out to a logical conclusion the scenario you're proposing.

> [...] if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct?

No - and that's bordering-on (if not fully) rude disrespect of reviewers time and effort. One way to think of this is in terms of Brandolinis Law[0]. Pushing work back to submitters is going to have to happen. Low-effort "submissions" are first and foremost "low-effort" - that's going to have to be driven home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

Probably a time waster because of the intermediate patch contributor. It’s like a game of telephone at worst, at best the reviewer could just use their own LLM and get the same result.

Here’s my hot take: maybe code contributions are obsoleted by coding agents. No one will accept outside contributions because it’s faster to do it themselves.

It depends entirely on how much slop they are flooded with.

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