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by nunez 11 days ago
With all due respect, this is a bit disingenuous coming from you.

GitHub's exponential growth in number of commits and PRs answers your question.

Before AI, if you wanted to contribute to OSS, you had to have _some_ idea of what the code did. At least enough of an idea to compile it so that you could test your changes.

That was the bar. Sure, lots of low quality PRs existed, but that gate kept the influx somewhat manageable.

Also, the diffs were a lot smaller, as bigger diffs meant bigger effort, a risky gamble for a PR that might not get merged. You've lived that life, so you get it.

Post AI (post Opus, really), any hooligan with $200/mo to burn can "land" a Heisenberg sized PR into any project with green tests without having the slightest bloomin' clue what their diff does or how the codebase they're integrating into works. That's impossible for humans to keep up with.

For every SQLite cathedral, there are a hundred corporate projects whose employers are mandating 100% AI generation with manual PR/MR merges.

1 comments

The AI PRs are a bit annoying, but I've been learning new ways to see the signal and it's not that bad. Heisenberg sized PRs from new contributors never should have been merged even pre AI. AI is like a new version of the software engineering game came out and the meta shifted, but the new game is pretty cool!