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Comment by brettermeier | Hacker News Reader

Do those AI contributors really think they are helping out? Don't they get, that they are destroying such projects with their "work"? Why do they spend money for stuff nobody wants and gets rejected. I don't get it... Don't these people have any hobbies? Or are these free-roaming OpenClaw instances that have been forgotten by their creator and are now doing their own thing?

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We are no longer in the era of FOSS where contributions are purely motivated by either scratching your own itch, altruism or curiosity. Haven't been for over a decade, since that's how long companies have been checking out applicants' GitHub pages during hiring.

These people are farming contributions to major FOSS projects as a form of CV-padding. The same is happening with vulnerability reports. The sloppers may genuinely think they're helping out, or they may know their 'contributions' are a net negative for the projects, in the end it doesn't matter much. When you're motivated by direct economical incentives and your situation is precarious enough (in today's labor market, it is), externalities are not high on your list of concerns.

Exactly. That’s the only real core issue. Wild AI usage is just a consequence.

Developers who have a nice job and career, and are making good money, might think of doing open source to “contribute to society” or something like that.

But new developers who are seeing those golden opportunities shut in front of their faces, they feel like they have to desperately fight for the last places on the lifeboat, so I don’t blame them for wanting to farm cv points and game the system of incompetent recruiters who make much more then they will do, instead of spending time and effort doing something nice for society hoping someone will notice (lol they will not, especially if you’re a nobody)

Yes, this was a huge problem even before AI. You had people spamming open source repos with 2 line "documentation cleanup" PRs that just capitalized some word or something. Totally pointless, but someone, somewhere is telling these people that it will help them get a job so they're all spamming. AI just let the spamming happen at scale.

Who the hell is looking at someone's "documentation cleanup" GitHub PRs and using them to boost their job application? I've served as an interviewer at every job I've worked and none of them tell you to even look at the candidate's GitHub, let alone allow its existence or nonexistence to influence your appraisal.

It's a sad state of affairs really. But I also think this high degree of slop everywhere will eventually shift what people and organizations deem valuable and how they scan or select for it, it's unsustainable otherwise. You're seeing it here already, and in other places as well.

They could just fork and have AI contribute to it as a form to pad their CV.

They can even list on their CV that they are the maintainers of those projects.

There are degrees to "AI contributors". E.g. recently I have stumbled upon rare edge case in an OSS tool written in Rust. It would have taken me a week+ to be able to contribute a minor change in a clean and Rust-idiomatic way as this is not the language I'm proficient in, and Claude did that in 1 hour, with 3 or 4 rounds of tweaks from me to reduce the walls of text and make the contribution matching the of the original project. Alternative was just swiping it under the rug or opening an issue instead (thus placing the burden on the maintainer).

I do think I helped out.

And I have discovered this edge case when fiddling with my homelab which is my hobby.

Well, I tried to contribute using AI. Brew and far2 accepted my work, KDE spectacle maintainers did not answer.

Both PR were tiny, not different from human PR. I still believe these were valuable additions, and obviously some maintainers think the same.

this is like ai use in arts to some degree, people don't want to write, they want to 'have written' and collect the social status that they think it confers. People don't want to code or make products better (or even understand the details) they want 'lines of code' or 'commit' or a pretty github green profile.

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