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by krupan 33 days ago
This is what we get for telling everyone how amazing AI is at writing code. It started with the people selling AI and for some reason tons of independent developers, some quite well respected in our field, piled on. Facebook now laying people off and saying it's because AI is just so good adds more fuel to the fire. Now you have a bunch of people fully confident that their AI friend is pumping out amazing code and submitting it to projects that are completely overwhelmed
3 comments
smaudet 33 days ago
> and for some reason tons of independent developers

Cowboy coders got a virtual cowgirl coder and sold it to everyone, hmm, maybe... (respected or not, solo devs don't always have the requisite skills to not be a cowboy, either due to lack of experience or lack of innate skill)

I don't know that I completely buy this narrative, though. There has been a strong, top-down push for this since the "beginning".

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marcus_holmes 33 days ago
No, this is a result of unintended consequences.

We made "Github contributions" a metric for people applying for dev jobs. So, of course, because devs are the kind of people we are, they started working out how to game that metric.

Some folks decided to start paying bounties on bug fixes, features, etc. Those bounties are fairly trivial by western standards, but are significant for developing countries. This creates a new career for developers; racing to collect the bounties on offer.

LLMs have exacerbated these problems by allowing existing people doing this to do it faster, and also allowing more people to pretend to be software developers and get in on the action.

If we stopped allowing LLM-authored contributions we'd still have too many shitty PRs. It would just be back to pre-LLM levels of "too many".

The answer is to make Github contributions valueless. Stop paying bounties, and stop using them to assess candidates.

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watwut 33 days ago
This feels like an alternative history. OS contributions were never all that important metric and overwhelming majority of developers have literally none.

And it is not like AI spam would be limited or even primary targetted at bounties.

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marcus_holmes 33 days ago
There's a whole thing about advising new folks in the industry to contribute to OS projects on github as proof that they're actually really keen developers.

This [0] is an example, there are many more.

The whole idea that we have to have a "portfolio" of work.

[0] https://talentslab.io/7-strategies-for-a-junior-developer-to...

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heavyset_go 33 days ago
The astroturfing successfully broke a lot of people's brains
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