Relevant since we started outright rejecting agent-made PRs in awesome-selfhosted [1] and issuing bans for it. Some PRs made in good faith could probably get caught in the net, but it’s currently the only decent tradeoff we could make to absorb the massive influx of (bad) contributions. >99.9% of them are invalid for other reasons anyway. Maybe a good solution will emerge over time.
Is this a technology issue or a human one?
If you don’t understand the code your AI has written, don’t make a PR of it.
If your AI is making PRs without you, that’s even worse.
Basically, is technology the job we need here to manage the bad behavior of humans? Do we need to reach for the existing social tool to limit human behavior, law? Like we did with CopyLeft and the Tragedy Of The Commons.
This is happening a lot more these days, with OpenClaw and its copycats. I’m seeing it at work too - bots submitting merge requests overnight based on items in their owners’ todo lists.
That is basically DDoSing open source project, which will not merge code without it being properly reviewed. Almost all open source projects are basically artisan code and the maintainers are the custodians of it.
I definitely agree with you!
I’m using AI a little bit myself, but I’m an experienced developer and fully understand the code it’s writing (and review all of it manually). I use it for tedious things, where I could do it myself but it’d take much longer. I don’t let AI write commit messages or PR descriptions for me.
At work, I reject AI slop PRs, but it’s becoming harder since AI can submit so much more code than humans can, and there’s people that are less stringent about code quality than I am. A lot of the issues affecting open-source projects are affecting proprietary code too. Amazon recently had to slow down with AI and get senior devs to review AI-written code because it was causing stability issues.
Broadly, I see “AI” as part of enshitification. I think it’s brain rotting. It’s commerial setup to get your dependent on it.
You can run your own AI locally if you have powerful enough equipment, so that you’re not dependent on paying a monthly fee to a provider. Smaller quantized models work fine on consumer-grade GPUs with 16GB RAM.
The major issue with AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI at the moment is that they’re all subsidizing the price. Once they start charging what it actually costs, I think some of the hype will die off.
Oh I know you can run it locally, but I don’t think you can’t create it locally because even if you had the compute, you don’t have the training material.
I don’t know how long AI companies are expecting to run at a loss. It is normal for a while for new bigtech. Though this is new scales. Hopefully this bubble with deflate rather than pop, just because the amount of money will have real world consequences.
Honest question: How is it different than anything else we are dependent on? The ‘dependent on’ list is quite long and includes things like transportation, infrastructure, power grid, fuel, food supply, water supply, industry, internet communications, et al. We are very dependent upon these things. Are they ‘enshitifications’ as well? I’ve tried to construct my life to be as independent as possible. I grow my own food, pump my water from several wells on my property, employ solar power while still connected to the grid. Try as I may, I am still dependent.
Well one way is I don’t depend on it already. But it’s also not like food or water, or grid, society infrastructure in general. It’s just another way of doing compute, but dependent on big tech’s big iron. Being made dependent on big tech is the enshitification. It’s just another method, they have already done all the anticompetition they can. Consumer choice isn’t a solution to regulatory failure, but it’s not nothing.
On top of poltical/power problem, it will have similar effect on software developer brains as satnavs do the navigation parts of our brains. Like satnavs, there will be way to get the good / bad balance better, but that’s not in big tech’s interest. It’s all so damn toxic and drowning open source project in slop PR requests.