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Comment by rednafi | Hacker News Reader

Creating crap vuln reports or PRs on popular OSS projects has been an issue long before LLMs. Remember Hacktoberfest?

Students would often abuse it since there’s no adult in the room to teach them how to behave. I guess this is one hard way to f around and find out. But this is by no means condoning this sort of behavior.

Point is, LLMs made the situation more dire: it’s cheap to generate code, whereas reviewing still scales sublinearly. The only way to prevent this is by being rude to people who are rude to you.

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It's never fine to be rude.

Moving off github into a more niche platform was the best choice I have ever made to curb such zero-effort issue and feature requests. It raises the barrier just enough.

On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping. I participated in projects where the approach is to start a discussion on a forum first, and I get the same feeling you have as a tech guy calling ISP support on the phone.

The discussion requirement is often to prevent disappointment, waste of time, and anger, when maintainers simple close PRs, because it's not the direction they want the project to go. A lot of people will take this very personally, so it's much better to have a conversation about it beforehand.

> On the other hand, I'm a dev, and I hate the "start a discussion first" gatekeeping

Seems like a completely appropriate way to handle things if you're still on Github. You said yourself the spam drove you off.

They could let people who are proven not to be spammers open PRs directly.

> You said yourself the spam drove you off.

Yes, indeed. But I still stand by the gatekeeping though.

Sadly, it's a tragedy due to how popular github (and similar services) have become.

These sites were supposed to be by developers for developers.

Problem is that the LLM operators don't care if you're rude. They copy and paste your response to the LLM and probably don't read it themselves. If they do read it they don't suffer any ego hit from it because if there was any error it was the LLM's not theirs and their LLM is busy telling them how brilliant and unparalleled they are and how wrong the haters are in any case.

CURL is free to try it, but I'm doubtful being rude will meaningfully improve things. I'm confident it won't improve the ratio of good to bad reports because non-chatbot powered submitters are sensitive to rudeness or even the threat of potential rudeness, and so this approach could easily reduce total volume some but mostly in the reduction of good submissions.

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