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Comment by yuppiepuppie | Hacker News Reader

I love Django. Ive been using it professionally and on side projects extensively for the past 10 years. Plus I maintain(ed) a couple highly used packages for Django (django-import-export and django-dramatiq).

Last year, I had some free time to try to contribute back to the framework.

It was incredibly difficult. Difficult to find a ticket to work on, difficult to navigate the codebase, difficult to get feedback on a ticket and approved.

As such, I see the appeal of using an LLM to help first time contributors. If I had Claude code back then, I might have used it to figure out the bug I was eventually assigned.

I empathize with the authors argument tho. God knows what kind of slop they are served everyday.

This is all to say, we live in a weird time for open source contributors and maintainers. And I only wish the best for all of those out there giving up their free time.

Dont have any solutions ATM, only money to donate to these folks.

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There is a clear correlation between the rise in LLM use and the volume of PRs and bug reports. Unfortunately, this has predominately increased the volume of submissions and not the overall quality. My view of the security issues reported, many are clearly LLM generated and at face value don't seem completely invalid, so they must be investigated. There was a recent Django blog post about this [1].

The fellows and other volunteers are spending a much greater amount of time handling the increased volume.

[1] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/feb/04/recent-tren...

Its weird that still so many consider bug triage a problem to be circumnavigated, somehow in the way of "actual" contributions. Those are actual contributions! Even if they never make it into structured documentation or even python code. And especially so since that work can less usefully be augmented with newly available tool use.

A number of times now, I have found real value in someone just dropping into the bugtracker to restate the bug description in clearer terms or providing a shorter reproducer. Even if the flaw in Django had been fixed right away, I would not have pulled patches from master anyway. So the ticket comment was still a useful contribution to django, because I could use it in resolving the issue in how my software triggered it.

I agree somewhat, as I deal with an internal legacy codebase that's pretty hard to follow, and I use Gemini, Claude, etc to help learn, debug solutions and even propose solutions. But there's a big difference in using it as a learning tool and just having the LLM "do it". I see little value in first time contributors just leaning on an LLM to just do it.

I picked up a change that had broad consensus and quite a bit of excitement over even by some core devs.

That ticket now just sits there. The implementation is done, the review is done, there are no objections. But it's not merged.

I think something is deeply wrong and I have no idea what it is.

Have you tried pinging in the Discord about it?

I'm banned for expressing my opinion that harassing new joiners who say "hey guys" is a bad idea. They claim it's anti-women to do that, even though the dictionary clearly says it's a gender neutral expression and you can see it in countless movies being said by women to only women.

Imo it's not inclusive to harass people for using English properly. But they think it's inclusive to ban me for that opinion. To each his own I guess.

I'm sure you believe that's the reason you got banned.

I'm sure you don't believe me. To each his own. In any case I'm banned.

Looking at your PR, the ticket is still marked as Needs documentation: yes Patch needs improvement: yes

If this is done, you should update it so it appears in the review queue.

Aha. Damn, I always miss stuff like this in trac. I really with they'd move over to github tickets!

Thank you for maintaining those packages! I've used django-import-export a few times.

For anybody else in this position, would heavily plug the djangonauts program

I applied to the djangonauts twice - but was rejected both times. I always liked the idea, but perhaps my profile was not what they were looking for /shrug

Hey, Tim here. OP and one of the admins for Djangonaut Space. I know it's demoralizing to get multiple rejections. We do value people who apply multiple times and have a better system for highlighting that now. I hope you reconsider again in the future. Or if you can, go to a DjangoCon and stay for the sprints. Those tend to provide a similar energy.

Thank you. django-dramatiq has been fantastic.

Awesome! Glad you like it :)

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