[20k]

If coding is a solved problem, where are all the high quality, open source PRs is what I want to know. Where's the flood of improvements for Curl? SFML? SDL? Godot? Linux? ImGui? VLC? Firefox? GNU tools? Rust? GCC? LLVM? Why can I find *no* evidence of this?

If you look at the open source space and review the contribution of AI in it, you'd think that AI is barely able to create functional code and the people who peddle it are solely slop authors. More than that, you might think it barely exists, because there's simply vanishingly few PRs landing which are AI generated. It seems in open source projects, for some reason, AI is barely able to produce any useful code at all

But apparently for closed source proprietary code its like magic and you don't need to write any code anymore and it is a solved problem. Mhm. Totally willing to believe that

My suspicion is that a lot of proprietary software engineering has become purely performative. It no longer matters if the resulting product works, or has any quality, because its not about that. The system is being burnt down to extract wealth from it instead, as we create the illusion of software development as these companies are asset stripped. Line Must Go Up. There's no simply incentive to make a real product anymore, when the valuation of our economy and management compensation is built solely on hype instead of results

[kimjune01]

the bottleneck for these open source repos is maintainer attention. AI seemingly does not yet improve that throughput.

[20k]

I'd buy that if lots of high quality PRs were sitting around waiting to be merged, but they don't exist. There's barely any evidence that AI is even real in the open source world, other than the slop of course

[kimjune01]

for small to medium sized bugs I managed to get a bit more than half of my PRs to get merged. ~90 PRs since May

https://june.kim/speedrunning-open-source

Verify yourself: { merged: search(query: "is:pr is:merged author:kimjune01 created:>2026-05-09T00:34:00Z", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } closed: search(query: "is:pr is:closed is:unmerged author:kimjune01 created:>2026-05-09T00:34:00Z", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } allTime: search(query: "is:pr is:merged author:kimjune01 -user:kimjune01", type: ISSUE) { issueCount } }

[20k]

Man, truly absolutely gross to see this, this is some incredibly unethical engineering here. This is literally why people hate AI slop. Its not surprising to me that you didn't want to even write the post yourself

>It cost me 53 merges, 63 closures, a billion Opus tokens, and eight account blocks

I can't believe people think this is acceptable. You didn't fix any problems, you just managed to deliberately sneak slop past maintainers without their knowledge. There's no review by you here that any of the PRs actually fixed anything (presumably because software engineering is a learned skill), you just assume that the AI fixed the bugs without checking any of it apparently because.. you feel you're important?

[kimjune01]

the issues were already validated by the maintainers, and the maintainers merged it into their repo voluntarily. When maintainers accepted the PRs, they were the ones who found it acceptable. I found that well-tested PRs are more likely to get merged, so I deliberately had it pick bugs that were easy to verify. I didn't need to get involved after I specified that criteria.

Humans don't get a 100% merge rate either, so it's a matter of degree to which stranger is more effective at contributing to open source. It was an experiment where I accumulated lessons about how OSS works, and the lessons are open and available for your viewing here: https://github.com/kimjune01/sweep/blob/main/HYPOTHESIS_GRAP...

AI is good at fixing a narrow subset of issues/tasks in GitHub, so humans still need to be involved in most tasks.