Hacker News Reader

Comment by jruohonen | Hacker News Reader

A funny read with a grain of wisdom too, I suppose. Is the following the future of open source, I wonder? And will GitHub face the same slop-destiny as mainstream social media?

> I'm not sure how we will go ahead here, but it’s pretty clear that in projects that don’t submit themselves to the slop loop, it’s going to be a nightmare to deal with all the AI-generated noise.

> Some projects no longer accept human contributions until they have vetted the people completely.

Also reminds of the following recent piece that talked about increasing (or exploding?) verification debt:

https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/verification-debt-when-generat...

View on HN

> will GitHub face the same slop-destiny as mainstream social media

At the very least because it's now human + coding agent, separating out the human input from the machine output in pull requests becomes necessary in my book. There are dramatic differences in prompting styles that can have completely different qualities of output and it's much easier to tell it apart from the prompts than from the outputs given that it's basically an amplification problem.

> separating out the human [input] from the machine

I was thinking more generally and thus put the noun input in parenthesis in the quote. With agents and slop, the value for humans being there may quickly spiral down. There are also a lot of bad stuff already there, including malware and such.

If you have your own infrastructure instead of a mega-platform, you can control these things more easily.

The value in open source code was never the code. It was the trust that was created around it that it becomes a place for useful innovation, for trust, for vetting, for keeping dependencies low.

I can build my own curl in a week, but the value that curl gives me is that it's a multi decade old library, by a person that has dedicated his live to keeping the project there, keeping a quality bar etc.

The value of curl is not curl, it's the human behind it.

The human behind it, the community using it critically, and the years of battle hardening.

The great open source tools out there have handled, worked around, or influenced away many many bugs and edge cases out in the real world, many of which you wont think of when initially designing your own. The silent increase in stability and productivity resulting from this kind of thing is as vast as it is hard to see/measure. It feels like the quote about expertise saying someone "has forgotten more than I'll ever know about [subject]".

Thank you to everyone powering our collective work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com