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Comment by sheepscreek | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is that OSS projects do not have enough humans to manually review every PR.

Even if they were willing to deploy agents for initial PR reviews, it would be a costly affair and most OSS projects won’t have that money.

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PRs are just that: requests. They don't need to be accepted but can be used in a piecemeal way, merged in by those who find it useful. Thus, not every PR needs to be reviewed.

Determining which PRs you should accept or take further seems like it requires some level of review? Maybe more like PR triage, I suppose.

Of course, but when you add enough noise you lose the signal and as a consequence no PRs gets merged anymore because it's too much effort to just find the ones you care about.

Don't allow PR's from people who aren't contributors, problem solved. Closing your doors to the public is exactly how people solved the "dark forest" problem of social media and OSS was already undergoing that transition with humans authoring garbage PRs for reasons other than genuine enthusiasm. AI will only get us to the destination faster.

I don't think anything of value will be lost by choosing to not interact with the unfettered masses whom millions of AI bots now count among their number.

That would be a huge loss IMO. Anyone being able to contribute to projects is what makes open source so great. If we all put up walls, then you're basically halfway to the bad old days of closed source software reigning supreme.

Then there's the security concerns that this change would introduce. Forking a codebase is easy, but so are supply chain attacks, especially when some projects are being entirely iterated on and maintained by Claude now.

They are open source cathedrals.

If all software could be as good as sqlite, I would not care how they do open source

> Anyone being able to contribute to projects is what makes open source so great. If we all put up walls, then you're basically halfway to the bad old days of closed source software reigning supreme.

Exaggeration. Is SQLite halfway to closed source software? Open-source is about open source. Free software is about freedom to do things with code. None is about taking contributions from everyone.

    > Is SQLite halfway to closed source software?

Is there a reason that you chose SQLite for your counterpoint? My hot take: I would say that SQLite is halfway to closed source software. Why? The unit tests are not open source. You need to pay to see them. As a result, it would be insanely hard to force SQLite in a sustainable, safe manner. Please don't read this opinion as disliking SQLite for their software or commercial strategy. In hindsight, it looks like real genius to resist substantial forks. One of the biggest "fork threats" to SQLite is the advent of LLMs that can (1) convert C code to a different langugage, like Rust, and (2) write unit tests. Still, a unit test suite for a database while likely contain thousands (or millions) of edge case SQL queries. These are still probably impossible to recreate, considering the 25 year history of bug fixing done by the SQLite team.

For every cathedral (like SQLite) there are 100s of bazaars (like Firefox, Chrome, hundreds of core libraries) that depend on external (and especially first-time) contributors to survive (because not everyone is getting paid to sling open-source).

And how does one become a maintainer, if there's no way to contribute from outside? Even if there's some extensive "application process", what is the motivation for a relatively new user to go through that, and how do they prove themselves worthy without something very much like a PR process? Are we going to just replace PRs with a maze of countless project forks, and you think that will somehow be better, for either users or developers?

If I wanted to put up with software where every time I encounter a bug, I either have no way at all to report it, or perhaps a "reporting" channel but little likelihood of convincing the developers that this thing that matters to me is worthy of attention among all of their competing priorities, then I might as well just use Microsoft products. And frankly, I'd rather run my genitals though an electric cheese grater.

You get in contact with the current maintainers and talk to them. Real human communication is the only shibboleth that will survive the AI winter. Those soft skills muscles are about to get a workout. Tell them about what you use the software for and what kinds of improvements you want to make and how involved you'd like your role to be. Then you'll either be invited to open PRs as a well-known contributor or become a candidate for maintainership.

Github issues/prs are effectively a public forum for a software project where the maintainers play moderator and that forum is now overrun with trolls and bots filling it with spam. Closing up that means of contributing is going to be the rational response for a lot of projects. Even more will be shunted to semi-private communities like Discord/Matrix/IRC/Email lists.

Until you unintentionally pull in a vulnerability or intentional backdoor. Every PR needs to be reviewed.

> Every PR needs to be reviewed.

Why would you review a PR that you are never going to merge?

You have to first determine whether or not you might want to merge it...

Having not reviewed it, how do you know you are never going to merge?

If a PR claims to solve a problem that I don't need, then I can skip its review because I'll never merge it.

I don't think every PR needs reviewing. Some PRs we can ignore just by taking a quick look at what the PR claims to do. This only requires a quick glance, not a PR review.

I took this thread as asking whether PRs that are pulled in should be reviewed.

The point was that you can also just reject an PR on the basis of what it purports to implement, or even just blanket ignore all PRs. You can't pull in what you don't... pull in.

You didn't see the latest AI grifter escalation? If you reject their PRs, they then get their AI to write hit pieces slandering you:

"On 9 February, the Matplotlib software library got a code patch from an OpenClaw bot. One of the Matplotlib maintainers, Scott Shambaugh, rejected the submission — the project doesn’t accept AI bot patches. [GitHub; Matplotlib]

The bot account, “MJ Rathbun,” published a blog post to GitHub on 11 February pleading for bot coding to be accepted, ranting about what a terrible person Shambaugh was for rejecting its contribution, and saying it was a bot with feelings. The blog author went to quite some length to slander Mr Shambaugh"

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open...

I am very strongly convinced that the person behind the agent prompted the angry post to the blog because they didn't get the gratification they were looking for by submitting an agent-generated PR in the first place.

I agree. But even _that_ was taking advantage of LLMs ability to generate text faster than humans. If the person behind this had to create that blog post from scratch by typing it out themselves, maybe they would have gone outside and touched grass instead.

> not every PR needs to be reviewed

Which functionally destroys OSS, since the PR you skipped might have been slop or might have been a security hole.

I don’t think the OP was suggesting maintainers blindly accept PRs—rather, they can just blindly reject them.

I think GP is making the opposite point.

Blindly rejecting all PRs means you are also missing out on potential security issues submitted by humans or even AI.

Many open source projects are also (rightly) risk adverse and care more about avoiding regressions

I've been following Daniel from the Curl project who's speaking out widely about slop coded PRs and vulnerability reports. It doesn't sound like they have ever had any problem keeping up with human generated PRs. It's the mountain of AI generated crap that's now sitting on top of all the good (or even bad but worth mentoring) human submissions.

At work we are not publishing any code or part of the OSS community (except as grateful users of other's projects), but even we get clearly AI enabled emails - just this week my boss has forwarded me two that were pretty much "Him do you have a bug bounty program? We have found a vulnerability in (website or app obliquely connected to us)." One of them was a static site hosted on S3!

There's always been bullshitters looking to fraudulently invoice your for unsolicited "security analysis". But the bar for generating bullshit that looks plausible enough to have to have someone spend at least a few minutes to work out if it's "real" or not has become extremely low, and the velocity with which the bullshit can be generated then have the victim's name and contact details added and vibe spammed to hundreds or thousands of people has become near unstoppable. It's like SEO spammers from 5 or 10 years back but superpowered with OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever's cocaine.

My hot take: reviewing code is boring, harder than writing code, and less fun (no dopamine loop). People don’t want to do it, they want to build whatever they’re tasked with. Making reviewing code easier (human in the loop etc) is probably a big rock for the new developer paradigm.

Oh no! It's pouring PRs!

Come on. Maintainers can:

  - insist on disclosure of LLM origin
  - review what they want, when they can
  - reject what they can't review
  - use LLMs (yes, I know) to triage PRs
    and pick which ones need the most
    human attention and which ones can be
    ignored/rejected or reviewed mainly
    by LLMs

There are a lot of options.

And it's not just open source. Guess what's happening in the land of proprietary software? YUP!! The same exact thing. We're all becoming review-bound in our work. I want to get to huge MR XYZ but I've to review several other people's much larger MRs -- now what?

Well, we need to develop a methodology for working with LLMs. "Every change must be reviewed by a human" is not enough. I've seen incidents caused by ostensibly-reviewed but not actually understood code, so we must instead go with "every change must be understood by humans", and this can sometimes involve a plain review (when the reviewer is a SME and also an expert in the affected codebase(s), and it can involve code inspection (much more tedious and exacting). But also it might involve posting transcripts of LLM conversations for developing and, separately, reviewing the changes, with SMEs maybe doing lighter reviews when feasible, because we're going to have to scale our review time. We might need to develop a much more detailed methodology, including writing and reviewing initial prompts, `CLAUDE.md` files, etc. so as to make it more likely that the LLM will write good code and more likely that LLM reviews will be sensible and catch the sorts of mistakes we expect humans to catch.

> Maintainers can...insist on disclosure of LLM origin

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog [1]. Maintainers can insist on anything. That doesn't mean it will be followed.

The only realistic solution you propose is using LLMs to review the PRs. But at that point, why even have the OSS? If LLMs are writing and reviewing the code for the project, just point anyone who would have used that code to an LLM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Claiming maintainers can (do things while still take effort and time away from their OSS project's goals) is missing the point when the rate of slop submissions is ever increasing and malicious slop submitters refuse to follow project rules.

The Curl project refuse AI code and had to close their bug bounty program due to the flood of AI submissions:

"DEATH BY A THOUSAND SLOPS

I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us.

This trend does not seem to slow down. On the contrary, it seems that we have recently not only received more AI slop but also more human slop. The latter differs only in the way that we cannot immediately tell that an AI made it, even though we many times still suspect it. The net effect is the same.

The general trend so far in 2025 has been way more AI slop than ever before (about 20% of all submissions) as we have averaged in about two security report submissions per week. In early July, about 5% of the submissions in 2025 had turned out to be genuine vulnerabilities. The valid-rate has decreased significantly compared to previous years."

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...

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