[bluefirebrand]

Unfortunately "I donated money/tokens to open source" doesn't land interviews as well as "I'm a big contributor to open source"

People spamming Open Source repos with AI PRs aren't trying to help Open Source, they're trying to build a brand, some kind of credible online presence with their username on it, or whatever else. It's purely selfish and completely opposite to the spirit of Open Software imo

[ffaccount2]

>People spamming Open Source repos with AI PRs aren't trying to help Open Source, they're trying to build a brand

I am certain many of them honestly believe that they are doing the right thing and that they are helping. After all hey, they implemented a feature or fixed a bug for the community! It's a grim worldview if you think they are all just selfish.

[Larrikin]

I would argue this is naive and there's very little evidence to support this opinion other than just wishing it was true.

It may happen on smaller projects with few users but not in meaningful large projects.

[janalsncm]

> there's very little evidence to support this opinion other than just wishing it was true

Building a brand doesn’t require submitting to someone else’s open source project. You can do the same thing by creating your own OSS project.

For a lot of them it’s probably a little of column A and a little of column B.

If people are submitting in their real name it’s more likely they’re building a brand. I also think it’s possible for someone to genuinely think they are helping without trying to build reputation.

[dormento]

> they implemented a feature or fixed a bug for the community!

yeah but, did they really?

All IMHO of course, but:

If they understand what they did, it follows that they understand someone has to approve/disapprove that contribution for it to land in the repo, and therefore, size their contributions accordingly to make reviewers lives easier.

If they do not understand what they did, they should not be attempting to land high-value high-complexity contributions yet; they should start with something smaller precisely so they can learn.

Edit: I realize I probably sound too grumpy about it, its just that they could be doing it in their own project, in their own repo, where they're free to go for anything they are comfortable with.

[thewebguyd]

Yeah. I'm sure some (maybe a lot?) are for selfish reasons, but there is also a pretty large section of users who have always wanted to contribute, help out, or make some features in their favorite projects and just never had the skill or opportunity to do so and see LLMs as a way for them to final actualize that desire.

Think about it from the perspective of a non-programmer, or even total non-technical person. Vibe coding to someone like that looks like complete magic. Suddenly to that person, a whole new world has opened up. Ideas, features, bug fixes they've always wanted but could never do now look possible. That particular group of people don't see it as spamming the maintainer, they genuinely feel like they're finally able to help.

[Exoristos]

So they're not just selfish, but delusional.

[parliament32]

They're stuck in this idea that somehow they're better at prompting the slop generator than anyone else, therefore they're helpful and people definitely want their output merged in to these various projects. They will have trouble understanding that their personal contribution to the whole process is somewhere between negligible and harmful, and simply donating those tokens to a maintainer who is actually aware of how the codebase works and where all the skeletons are is a much better proposition.

[sureglymop]

Interestingly then, those contributions are also not a measurement of the candidates abilities but mostly of the AI models.

I wonder if hiring adjusts to that but I doubt it. It might only push it even more towards "marketing matters most" instead of actual ability.

[stackghost]

>I wonder if hiring adjusts to that but I doubt it

Tech hiring/interviews have almost nothing to do with assessing the candidates' ability to do the job.

[janalsncm]

There are so many leetcode questions where solving it requires knowing some trick. Part of the trap for SWEs is that once you know the trick you feel smarter, but it really has nothing to do with software engineering.

Now that Claude is the best leetcoder in the world it would be great if companies which intend to hire humans would reconsider asking such dumb questions.

[slaymaker1907]

I've personally started focusing a lot more on code quality and communication skills over correctness of solving some leetcode problem. If I could get the infrastructure in place for it in the interview, I would have candidates generate something via AI and watch their process for that (how do they evaluate a plan, how do they review the code, etc.).

[toss1]

A fine example of Goodhart's law: "When a measurement becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measurement."

Measuring open source contributions as a way to judge prospective employees used to be a good measurement.

Of course, prospective employees started to not only contribute to OS projects because it was good, but to make sure their contributions were high and noticeable — contributing not for the good of the project but for their own good, and now with amplification of AI 'contributions'.

So, measuring contributions to open source projects is now approximately worthless for evaluating prospective employees.

[bitmasher9]

This is the most uncharitable outlook on the increase of PRs. It may be true for some contributors, but any company reviewing their GitHub will see that the code is largely spam.

I think most AI generated code is people that want to help the project, but maybe aren’t familiar with the standards and norms.

[parliament32]

For now. Give it another half year and "I contribute to open source" will carry the same weight as "I donate to charity" ie nobody cares because any idiot can do it.

I wonder how long it'll take before "I don't use LLMs for coding" carries weight.