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Comment by krackers | Hacker News Reader

To play devil's advocate, how is a project supposed to distinguish between your patch and "slop" without a reviewer having to put in effort to vet it. Especially since the patch was drafted by LLM, it seems fair to be immediately skeptical. Why should they trust your word that you "reviewed the patch" when that's what every other vibecoder claims?

It's true that they may not have known if the source was hidden. But on the flipside, if blanket banning any patch mentioning LLMs filters out 99% of garbage, in a maintainer's eyes that seems like a good tradeoff. There was an HN post a few days back about how LLMs are like a DDOS on OSS maintainers' time, and this just becomes collateral damage.

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Neither matter. The maintainer isn't required to adopt how they want to protect their repo, and lower the amount of value they perceive it to have. They can reject any patch for any reason, or no reason at all. No one is owed any control over their repo. If you want your code in the repo, you fork the repo.

The hurdle you have to clear as the devils advocate, is what rules is the maintainer allowed to enforce about their repo, and what are those limits. The maintainer doesn't want to introduce LLM generated code. Until you solve for that, nothing else matters.

Such ultra-liberal approach seems to project unfriendly collaboration culture..?

It seems to incentivize the contributor to try our proposing their patch multiple times repeatedly with varied introductory words just to test if the maintainer had a good day to accept the improved code.

> It seems to incentivize the contributor to try [to do something unethical]

I find the argument that the act of enforcing rules to protect the things that you want to protect, as the thing that incentivizes someone else to lie, stupid.

If I tell you no, I'm not encouraging you to try to figure out how to get around what I want. Why do you feel saying no counts as encouragement to ignore or evade it?

No.

The “contributor” doesn’t have the ability to contribute; They do not have copyright over the code so they can’t assign it.

The maintainer should not read it because then they could be tainted and perform accidental copyright infringement in the future.

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