Godot is drowning in AI slop pull requests | Hacker News Reader

Godot is drowning in AI slop pull requests

bsky.app

10 pointsmbreese4 comments

I don’t know how you have an open source code base allowing for new devs to submit pull requests and block bulk PR submissions. It seems like an impossible needle to thread. It doesn’t even sound like it’s necessarily automated agents making the PRs, but devs who manually are making the PR based on AI code that they don’t understand.

(Sadly) Do we need a captcha on PR submissions and a confirmation that the submitter understands the code in the PR.

You want to allow for new devs to submit code. And I’m not against AI code at all, but the submitter should understand every change they are proposing. I’m not sure how you stop new devs from contributing without putting up many roadblocks in the way.

If you believe the submitter should understand every change they're proposing, then you should be against AI code. The entire premise behind AI coding is to not have to understand, or even care, about the code you generate.

It would take less time for a competent developer to write any non-trivial PR themselves than it would for a vibe coder to have an AI generate it then learn it well enough (and test it well enough, assuming they aren't also testing with AI which you probably are) to be able to submit it.

AI code is the reason Godot and every other open source project is going to have to stop public PRs and only allow them from a team of vetted submitters. FOSS is going to have to go proprietary just to survive.

At a high level, I think there are multiple trends and angles to look at this.

AI Slop PRs: Github accounts trying to increase their clout? Someone genuinely needs that change in the PR? A competitor trying to slow down open source competition?

Maintainers: It's draining and demoralizing. Open source tooling hasn't caught up with coding agents.

Open source future: Quite clear that everyone using the same open source version is ending. In the future, open source projects will have many forks. One fork is maintained by X entity. X can be a person, an AI, a person using AI. Another is maintained by Y entity. Pick the one you trust most or what you need it to do. Then there are projects where the AI uses an open source project but makes substantial modifications on the fly without caring about opening a PR for others.

Longer term thoughts:

- Maybe open source projects in a few years won't be code. They'll just be prompts, which are just ideas and specs.

- PRs will just be modifications to the prompt.

soon nice projects like this will close their sources to only vetter devs and being able to commit to a cool project will be gatekeeped by an elite few on the project who ever fear the return of AI slop PRs

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