[xpe]

If the AI PR covered the bases within one standard deviation of your other (human) PRs, would you care?

Formerly "hand wavy" questions about humanity, cognition, awareness are now showing up right in front of us. They are transforming into things like (a) is this PR worth my time? (b) does it introduce legal / license risk? (c) what principles were considered during its creation and so on.

[ye-olde-sysrq]

The dose makes the poison. Do you remember when digital ocean (or someone similar) did that promotion thing for opening PRs/contributing to open source projects? It was a nightmare for maintainers because they were inundated with outright spam and also well-intentioned but poorly executed PR attempts by hapless newbies.

I think one reason that open source even kind of works is because "people contributing to open source" has a shit-ton of positive selection bias "baked in". The type of person liable to open a PR to an open source project is probably several standard deviations (or, at least one, right?) above the average developer. So that probably has the general effect of making reviewing a random cold-open PR less onerous of a task.

But if we cross into a world where the average value of a PR opened with a project drops substantially - either due to AI or due to a permanent advertising campaign from some company rewarding badges for opening open-source PRs - I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of open projects close/ignore github PRs and start doing something that looks more like how Linux handles it, where it's a lot more social-based and puts some of that positive-selection-bias filter back in place.

[LorenDB]

Indeed, when I saw this, I thought "Hacktoberfest is going to have problems this year."