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Comment by codingisfreedom | Hacker News Reader

I think the idea of leveraging AI to find useless PRs is right.

I didn’t like the second part though where it starts banning people for “bad behavior”.

I get that AI resistance will be a thing in the next few years, but realistically engineers who plan on being around for the next 20-30 years just need to embrace it instead of being sour about it.

Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a whole. People who seek more elevated/finer products can still turn to handcrafted products.

Mass software will be produced by AI, and it will scale just fine.

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> Because of machines, things have arguably improved for humanity as a whole.

That's a very narrow view of the situation. I agree that this side of the coin exists, but there's also the other side where drinkable tap water is becoming a luxury in much of the global North, giant tornadoes and fires are sweeping the Earth, and temperatures are growing out of control.

So, to make lives more comfortable with machines for some millions of privileged people, they triggered the 6th mass extinction. That's the other side of the coin.

We're already at the end of the 6th mass extinction FWIW. Over the last 200 years most species have gone extinct. There isn't that much left to make extinct. We'll manage it though.

Can you say more about this? The first link below [1] says there are an estimated eight million species today, and the second link [2] says the number of known extinct species since 1500 is 905.

1. https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/p...

2. https://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview5.htm...

> I didn’t like the second part though where it starts banning people for “bad behavior”.

I think you failed to notice the ban would be a reaction to recurrent bad behavior, such as ignoring maintainer requests.

What's your solution to handle accounts which spam projects with nonsense PRs?

> get that AI resistance will be a thing in the next few years (...)

This is a very lazy opinion to express. If you pay attention to the post you're replying to, you will notice that the problem isn't AI. The problem is spamming projects with PRs that are meaningless while completely ignoring maintainers.

You'd have the same problem if some guy decided to spam the project with a constant barrage of small low-effort nonfunctional PRs.

But there are no maintainer requests. There are is a bot prompted to be obtuse and a while and then reject.

What will be happening is that bot will happily talk with your but, but falsely flagged people will be antagonized and eventually angry.

> you will notice that the problem isn't AI. The problem is spamming projects with PRs that are meaningless while completely ignoring maintainers.

What I noticed is that this is literally what AI companies encourage. This is intended use of AI.

> But there are no maintainer requests.

You should really read the comments you are replying to. The whole point of the proposal is to provide actionable feedback to the people operating these drive-by PR bots, and kick out repeat offenders to prevent them from generating noise.

> What will be happening is that bot will happily talk with your but, but falsely flagged people will be antagonized and eventually angry.

I think you're trying too hard to come up with imaginary scenarios. Also, keep in mind that the objective is to steer contributions to be aligned with the project goals and help maintainers not waste time with low-quality noise. The goal is not to impose a fundamentalist militant stance against AI.

I did read it. It is not a plan to kick repeat offendrs. It is not a plan to give actionable feedback.

This plan will kick no bots, because bots dont mind discussion with another bot. However, falsely flagged people will realize they are talking with bot prompted to be obtuse, get annoyed anf then will be banned

> the objective is to steer contributions to be aligned with the project goals

That was not the objective as stated.

I just think when you close PR's outright, you tend to get angry responses. And as a maintainer, you don't want to deal with angry responses. People who post bot PR's but can't accept having their PR's closed by a bot, shouldn't be visible to the maintainers.

Which part of the second part do you dislike more?

That AI will be given the power to ban people?

Or that AI will be the ones getting banned?

If it's the former, expect an invite from the AI resistance. :)

If it's the latter, well, that can be fixed by spending more tokens and writing better PRs so that the AI moderator doesn't think they're "low-effort, AI-like". I've seen my share of low-effort PRs from humans, too. Low-effort is low-effort, whether it's from humans or AI.

> I didn’t like the second part though where it starts banning people for “bad behavior”.

What's your thoughts on them banning bots?

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