I think a lot of the issue with these AI submissions isn't so much that there's AI slop code that'll ruin everything. I mean yes, I'm sure there's plenty of that. But a lot of these prominent open source projects were hoping that the people making the submissions actually knew what they were doing and were doing it mostly for the love of the project. Or because they work for a company that is also maintaining it.

The problem I believe, is the motivation behind all of this. I'm going to guess that a lot of the submissions aren't useful because:

• They don't actually fix anything. They may just be rearranging code around
• They attempt to address something that didn't need fixing
• They may have found a legitimate bug... but so did the 100+ other people who did the same thing.

And everyone wants their name on the Linux kernel repo log so they can go show an employer or someone "LOOK, I CONTRIBUTED TO LINUX!!!!11 AREN'T I LEET?"

shuffy_losysI think a lot of the issue with these AI submissions isn't so much that there's AI slop code that'll ruin everything. I mean yes, I'm sure there's plenty of that. But a lot of these prominent open source projects were hoping that the people making the submissions actually knew what they were doing and were doing it mostly for the love of the project. Or because they work for a company that is also maintaining it.

The problem I believe, is the motivation behind all of this. I'm going to guess that a lot of the submissions aren't useful because:

• They don't actually fix anything. They may just be rearranging code around
• They attempt to address something that didn't need fixing
• They may have found a legitimate bug... but so did the 100+ other people who did the same thing.

And everyone wants their name on the Linux kernel repo log so they can go show an employer or someone "LOOK, I CONTRIBUTED TO LINUX!!!!11 AREN'T I LEET?"

You hit a lot of the points, there are a few more though.

The config:

sometimes changing a variable fixes an issue, but it can break it for others. The issue I have seen are people try and compensate by being “less destructive” but really they just show there hand that they don’t fully understand the issue.

A variable change that fixes it for you but breaks for others actually probably requires detection logic before the function not a change to the function itself.

That leads me into the other issue that stems from such.

Maintenance:

You fixed the bug and AI didn’t even mangle it. But you still don’t understand the product, or flow, you might not even be a software dev and are straight vibe coding. That’s not what some maintainers want, they want or maybe even a project NEEDs someone that can help maintain it, and flyby patching even if it works by people that don’t stick around is just more code someone overworked needs to remember and understand for you.

I’m not really against AI or help. I am not even against nobody’s using it to try and help.

But it does cause churn and it can be exhausting.

Please contribute smartly. When in doubt open a draft PR, start a discussion. Use your own branch for your goal and let a maintainer take over your draft when they can.

Edit edit edit: also if for whatever reason you cannot help yourself. Ask your AI to follow the repo convention and try to match stylistically.

Non software folks maybe don’t know, but the robot will try to code by the book usually the languages standard, that’s fine, but anyone who is into coding and has met others knows that coding is like language and you can have accents and speech patterns.

Telling AI to read the repo first and match stylistically can help your code “fit”.

Here is the link with the paywall removed. Archive.is works like a champ on all paywall news sites and so on.

archive.is/iskv1