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by simonw 17 days ago
> There is a small, ironic coda. The follow-up PR to delete the 600,000 or so lines of leftover Zig was titled, by Sumner, "ai slop." GitHub's automated anti-slop detection - built to flag exactly the kind of AI-generated mass change this was - caught it and auto-closed it. The author named his own cleanup slop, and the platform's tooling agreed.

That looked suspicious to me (you could almost say hallucinated...), so I checked it out. Here's the GitHub Action that adds that comment - written by Jarred back in February, so it's not accurate to classify it as "GitHub's automated anti-slop detection". https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/c01a5e08be896e1d1f4529...

It was Jarred who deliberately added the slop label to that PR, which triggered the Action comment: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30680#event-25523046939

1 comments

Humans can make errors; part of why I waited so long to write and post this is because I'm not a great Rust coder (at all) and I don't use Bun, so I felt like I lacked enough relevant insight to say anything, and this is part of that, I think.
> Humans can make errors

Sure, that makes sense, no one bats an eye over that.

But this seems like a typical LLM hallucination, get the overall picture right, but misattributed where the actual work was done, this time it confused a GitHub feature for a feature of that particular repository, very common LLM mistake.

I'd be curious to know, if you were actually the one who made this mistake, how it actually came about? When you looked into how the label/actions were working, how did you manage to confuse a Actions Workflow for a built-in GitHub feature?

Mostly because I finally figured out what I thought was relevant about the Bun port over the last couple of days, thanks to someone far more embedded in the ecosystem than I complaining about it. That complaint was the seed idea in the post, and shows up only remotely, because I thought the complaint itself was ranty and misplaced, but cast a shadow that actually interested me more.

So I did some casual research, but used generalized numbers and impressions; I wasn't trying to pretend deep research, and some of the numbers (like the 99.8%) were drawn from publications and discussions that seemed not in debate.

I am not an akshual journalist - I'm a systems architect who enjoys writing, who's served in a sort of journalistic role, and I sometimes write about topics that are not in my area of expertise. I don't write JS often myself; I've looked at Bun, particularly when it first came out, but my in-depth experience with it is minimal, so I'm writing everything from afar, and that includes the impression about the git interaction, which people wrote about and from which I inferred my conclusion, particularly because I didn't see the point of manually triggering the rejection.