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Comment by prymitive | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine the near future where companies “sponsor” open source projects by donating tokens to “mine” a PR for a feature they need.

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But the reason LLMs aren't used to build features isn't because they are expensive.

The hard work is the high level stuff like deciding on the scope of the project, how it should fit in to the project, what kind of extensibility the feature might need to be built with, what kind of other components can be extended to support it, (and more), and then reviewing all the work that was done.

I love this! Finally a more direct way for companies to sponsor open source development. GitHub Sponsors helps, but it is often so vague where the funding is going.

More often than not, for individuals, it's barely contributing to their living costs

If companies want to help they can just... I don't know... give projects some money

Unless companies also donate money to sponsor the code review that will be required to be done by real human being I could see this idea being a problem for maintainers. Yes you have to code review a human being as well but a human being is capable of learning and carrying that learning forward and their next PR will be better, as well as being able to look at past PRs to evaluate whether the user is a troll/bad actor or someone who genuinely wants to assist with the project. An LLM won't learn and will always spit out valid _looking_ code.

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