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Comment by dudeinhawaii | Hacker News Reader

I got to thinking about hiring, and things like looking at code history yesterday. There will be a lot of people who suddenly became prolific Github contributors after December of last year. I myself wrote 2 small-to-medium apps in a day using ChatGPT and added them to Github. I'm wondering if looking at Github history is now perhaps as useless as asking a potential writer for a writing sample.

Another point, the apps that I wrote with GPT-4 were filling gaps in my platform and things that would never have come off the backburner due to the lack of ROI. I wonder how we can accelerate contributions to OSS projects. Knocking out new features, refactorings and technical debt 10x faster. Of course it has to be done with care but -- an army of willing AI contributors...

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There is no reason someone couldn't change commit dates and be prolific far earlier than December

Lack of pre-december github activity could be an indicator, i.e. no pull requests, no issues, no stars or forks, perhaps even no feed updates, etc.

Lack of github activity may also be an indicator for having a life outside programming. Or using private repos.

Or just being as prolific on Gitlab, Bitbucket or elsewhere. We have to stop taking Github contributions so seriously.

How did you use CGPT to write an application? I understand how to use it to solve simple problems, but not create an application

Ask it to make an application.

The same way you would with a human developer. Plan it out, break it down into bite sized tasks, give the AI each task or parts thereof and plumb it all together yourself.

Github history has always been useless

Commit times are plain text user generated content

Just throw generated commits in a private repository and you have as much history as you want

If a sycophant or recruiter or employer wants to use that metric as an indicator of anything, that is pure happenstance and completely on them

> I myself wrote 2 small-to-medium apps in a day using ChatGPT and added them to Github. I'm wondering if looking at Github history is now perhaps as useless as asking a potential writer for a writing sample.

If I'm your hiring manager, I won't be bothered by it, since I know you can use ChatGPT to solve problem, which is what the company needs. But I will still need to assess you more in detail, to ensure that you can develop / solving problem well without ChatGPT, in case somehow it's unusable or provide wrong answers.

> I wonder how we can accelerate contributions to OSS projects.

LLMs are impressive, but hacking on pre-existing complex codebases seems to be a current weakness.

GitHub does not color the squares green for the past though, does it? I thought GitHub colors the squares green on the day you push the commits to them, not the alleged author date.

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