[hombre_fatal]

It always seemed like a weird default to let people (esp strangers) submit PRs that weren't tied to an issue nor approved.

What do you mean you just spent a week implementing something in secret?

AI makes it extra silly because now you can craft up your unsolicited code change in minutes, making it extra obvious that code changes should spawn from real discussion and agreement.

TFA is part of looking for new processes that actually work. Dunno why people are having such rose tinted glasses about pull requests. Open an issue, talk to people. Have an idea? Then get people to cosign it.

[robryan]

I think it was different pre-AI. Someone might come in and spend days getting some understanding of the codebase before they contribute some minor fix. Over time they might stick around a make some more of these, progressively gaining trust so when they do take on something bigger the maintainers will know they aren't wasting their time reviewing it.

Now they can drop a multi thousand line poorly understood PR day 1.

[embedding-shape]

As someone who maintained FOSS libraries pre-AI, I think the frequency might have changed, but large drive-by PRs with thousands of changes happened before too, I've been on the receiving end of those many times. Usually they fundamentally change the architecture too, then the submitter get offended/sad/surprised when you tell them you impossibly could accept it and they should stop wasting their time contributing without discussing first. Usually ends with some threats how their fork will take all the contributors or something like that.

What I don't get, is why these LLM users aren't asking their LLM for how to contribute and how the project prefers to contribute, and how they can make sure it's accepted? Literally, the very same tools they use to code, can be used to make sure their PR follows all guidelines, from discussions to acceptance of the PR itself, it's right there, they literally just have to prompt for it! Such a lazy group of people.

[arzig]

Good faith PRs were also suffering under the current model. Ive opened PRs by hand on small projects to try and fix personal issues that probably affected others. Then the PRs languish for months or in one case literal years under the deluge of ai slop being spammed at the repo. I’m not going to ping the maintainers constantly when I know they are struggling so I’m left running my fork and no one else gets the benefit.

[hombre_fatal]

Big projects pre-AI also can have hundreds of rotting PRs. It's a lot of work to go through them, and unsolicited PRs are kind of the wrong way to spend time as a maintainer.

AI just makes it so obvious how bad of a process it is that we can't ignore it anymore, and now we need to finally figure out good processes.

Even little stuff like: I've created issues on the Claude Code github that got agreement and then led to code changes. Why isn't there a default, built-in way for my issues to rise above the zero-effort chaff? If you finally do the work of vetting someone's PR, why isn't there a built-in (hidden) way to +1 someone so we can see that they have some reputation with the project on their future issues/PRs?