[arjie]

I think, amusingly, the right thing to do for most open-source projects is to have each pull request summary and code read by an agent that just reimplements itself from a description of what the code is intended to be. Other people's code is not particularly valuable anymore.

There are some projects where you can provide a PR and they'll just reimplement and I think that's probably adaptive to the world where PR's are cheap and reviews are expensive.

[csiegert]

There is also the solution of: No merge requests, just feature wishes and bug reports. All code is written solely by the maintainers (with the help of LLMs).

[arjie]

I believe that SQLite is like this. All code is internally written. Yep, also very reasonable. Amounts to how much external input you want, I suppose.

[parliament32]

Add a mechanism to donate tokens towards the maintainers' LLMs for a particular ticket and this whole class of problems will be resolved all at once.

[SoftTalker]

And creates a new class of problems. Why not just fork the project and modify it yourself at that point, and cut out the maintainer middleman.

[arjie]

I actually do that quite often these days. Keeping synced with upstream is trivial these days with a modern agent. Even just pi with DeepSeek V4 Flash can do it. It's a huge free-rider issue, but there's no way for me to contribute even human changes upstream because I'll be lost in the AI contributions so I don't bother.

So almost everything is forked and I then just have the agent keep my changes in sync with upstream. Works like a charm. I suspect my pattern is commonplace.

[freedomben]

Yep, same here. I hate it a lot, but it's the new reality. It's easier/better for me to just fork, change whatever the hell I want, and push it to my fork. If I become away that upstream wants it I'm happy to put in the work to get a clean merge, but I'm not wasting anymore time pushing things upstream without some indicator that my time is valued by them. Been burned too many time now. It wasn't this way pre-AI, but AI peed in the pool and there isn't a good way to clean it yet

[geon]

Because it is vibecoded garbage.

[parliament32]

Why fork at all? Why not just vendor the dependency and slop the changes you want on top of it? You can even pull from upstream down the line for the latest updates.

The problem is sloppers really, really want other people to use their code, so they feel useful for doing a bit of prompting, probably to rationalize how much they pay Anthropic et al to do the actual work for them. I just wish they'd direct that money directly to the projects they find useful instead of trying to insert themselves as middlemen.

[wereHamster]

> Add a mechanism to donate tokens

Or donate money. Crazy idea, eh?

[toomuchtodo]

Some people have tokens but no money. Tokens, like Amazon gift cards and Tide detergent [1], are a form of currency in a way. If people have a currency equivalent they want to spend for your benefit, or the collective benefit, it makes sense (depending on level of effort) to enable them to do so.

[1] How Tide Detergent Became a Drug Currency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023204 - January 2013 (124 comments)

(edit: maybe put AI tokens on stablecoin rails as value tokens? could be fun, could move them around instantly between participants on the value rails and could consume them programmatically, if someone implements this idea, buy me a beer!)

[nozzlegear]

> Some people have tokens but no money.

This sounds like a piece of worldbuilding from a Daniel Suarez novel. Who has tokens but no money?

[esafak]

That's the same as donating money, which you can already do.

[parliament32]

Well, yes, exactly. And yet nobody but the biggest corp-sponsored projects get anything more than negligible donations. So what does this tell us? These "contributors" are happy to throw money at open source projects as long as they think they're doing something by prompting the LLM?

[qazxcvbnmlp]

Being able to submit an issue, description, test criteria along with a token budget would be pretty cool.

[arjie]

There's an amusing attempt at this here: https://clevercrow.io/

It was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48621645

[ramraj07]

Thats just a coding agent the "peopple" use via you, with extra steps.