YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Well, this seems to be the point of it? To drive away contributors that maintainers regard as more trouble than worth.

Maybe the requests should be focused on one or two areas at a time so you can see some improvement over time instead of "everything at once".

AI has ruined all of our previous signals for high-effort work, it is effectively running a sybil attack on FOSS.

In that case, only getting a few, hand written PRs could mean getting fewer, but higher quality contributers.

Other projects might not care about getting many contributers, many stars or being widely used. It might simply be a small project someone wants to code by hand. That's absolutely valid, many people still have fun coding by hand.

The truth is just that there are a lot of slop PRs currently, where ppl just sicced an LLM on a problem, did not validate any findings, did not check the code, did not read the output and just acted as a meat proxy. In many cases, these bans on LLM PRs are simply a reaction to this flood of PRs. After all, as I said above - everyone can do those prompts themselves, they don't need a PR for that.

"Random strangers, please don't have your agent send us PRs, we don't want to review it" -> yeah, totally reasonable open source maintainer behaviour, doesn't update my perception of the project at all.

"All code in this repo must be written by hand" -> This is probably not a serious project and I'll make a mental note not to depend on it.

If servo is really in the latter camp I'd actually say that's negligent at this point. A browser engine that doesn't have agents scanning for and fixing vulns is totally unacceptable.

They're doing it because they already are targets.

The problem is that the last part changed drastically with LLMs. You can get a lot of solutions easily by prompting an LLM. But that also means you don't need outside PRs for that anymore, and just prompt the LLM yourself.

That means two things in my opinion:

1) People haven't internalized that yet. For a lot of people, a functioning solution to a problem with often quite a bit of source code is equivalent to "adding value" - because in the past it was. It meant you thought about the problem, understood it and found a solution. But it was that thinking that added the value.

2) The minimum threshold for adding this "quality" rises quite a bit. A lot of problems can now be solved very fast with an LLM by someone who understands the code base well enough. You don't need a PR for that.

I suspect, that means in the future you could both get and need less contributions to OSS projects in general.

We'll see

Some of that. Also sometimes there isn't even a person, just a bot opening a pull request that doesn't hear feedback.

There's also the problem that many projects put disproportionate effort into mentoring new contributors and helping them get things right, and that's valuable when there's a human learning something, but not when you're just correcting someone's LLM slop.

And that's leaving aside all the other problems, like "these things took all our FOSS code, ignoring its licenses, and then used it to compete with us and drown us out", or "these things are going to turn us all into paperclips".

Personally, I'd say the right way to use an LLM is to let it review your code, or be your rubber duck helping you design the architecture or evaluate the security model or similar, but not let it write the code for you. (Unless it's truly throw-away code, like "write me some code to benchmark X vs Y to evaluate which is better for my use case". In which case, the point wasn't the code, it was the numbers.)

I'd expect them to increasingly use AI to figure out the latest obfuscations regardless.