Hacker News Reader

Comment by QuantumNomad_ | Hacker News Reader

> From my experience reviewing, most contributors never read the policies, especially those making a "quick AI PR". I don't expect the new policy to change this much.

True. At least with a policy about it, the project maintainers can unilaterally close such PRs without further internal or external discussion on any case-by-case basis.

View on HN

Dingdingding, we have a winner. The main use of such a policy is to be able to just close those giant wall-of-text PRs and have something to point to when people start to scream it's not fair.

> when people start to scream it's not fair

Or LLMs, as we have seen.

Or, who knows, the "AI" might gain sufficient intelligence to read the policy...

Then we'll amend the policy to instruct LLMs to author PRs as Fred Flintstone, yabba dabba doo!

Why is a policy necessary. you were never entitled to have your pr merged in the first place? If pr wasn't reviewable pre AI I'd expect it to be closed or ignored too

The policy isn't necessary to close the PR. The policy just helps to shut down the ensuing discussion after closing the PR. It helps in quickly dealing with well-meaning onlookers asking for clarification when you block PRs from the account.

Still, your not even entitled to a discussion though.

Before AI a large pull request was enough effort to make that you could assume good faith work on the part of everyone. Likely even if it is bad for architectural reasons it is solving an itch other users have and it is reasonable for them to want an explanation why you refused someone who made this much effort. And since the effort required meant it didn't happen often it wasn't a big deal to provide that.

These days large PRs are easy to create and so humans need to shut them down.

Whether or not someone is entitled to something has very little bearing on whether someone believes they are entitled to something (and are willing to waste everyone's time to make a stink about it). Having clear rules to point to, even after the fact, is surprisingly effective in mitigating that.

Or, put more bluntly, your belief in what people ought to feel entitled to has no bearing on what they do believe, and policy needs to address the latter, not the former.

Prior to AI making a PR involved considerable effort from a human. So the default position for many open source projects was that it deserved some level of attention for the effort. Even if many projects in practice would struggle to review every PR. But with AI tools this dynamic has shifted dramatically - many PRs have basically zero effort been put into it. Additionally there are many more of them, and often way bigger also.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com