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Comment by FanaHOVA | Hacker News Reader

People can write horrible PRs manually just as well as they do with AI (see Hacktoberfest drama, etc).

"LLM Code Contributions to Official Projects" would read exactly the same if it just said "Code Contributions to Official Projects": Write concise PRs, test your code, explain your changes and handle review feedback. None of this is different whether the code is written manually or with an LLM. Just looks like a long virtue signaling post.

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Virtue signaling? That seems like an uncharitable reading.

The point, and the problem, is volume. Doing it manually has always imposed a de facto volume limit which LLMs have effectively removed. Which I understand to be the problem these types of posts and policies are designed to address.

A large enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. Chat bots have vastly inflated the amount of shitty PRs, to the degree that it needs different solutions to manage.

Exactly. We never had a problem with spammy PRs before. Even at the height of Hacktoberfest, the vast majority were painfully obvious and confined to documentation. It was easy and obvious to reject those. But LLMs have really changed the game, and this policy was explicitly prompted by a number of big PRs that were obviously purely vibe-coded and we felt we really needed to get a defined policy out that we could point to and say "no, this is why we're rejecting this".

The effort to write shitty code is way less when you are using IA, you can create a 1k lines PR with a single prompt. This policy is important because no one is saying "we hate AI" but instead advises developers to use it with responsibility. This is coming in time since many people are using it without understanding problems and not being accountable regarding the contributions.

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