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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle?

Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct?

I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?

Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”. The original authors have no idea what their agents are writing, these are mostly badly quality models (people doing this are not only cutting corners, but also using the less amount of money/tokens to do so). If the agent creates 200, 400 or whatever PRs and get 5 in the agent is still “winning” for the person instructing it. The maintainers though have to filter these out on the other side. A common case is a fix to something that was already fixed simply because the agent worked on old code assumptions.

It doesn't help with the additional work/chores, at least initially, but someone on HN had a really good idea IMO, just take the code, and close the PR.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474708

I saw the argument that if OS maintainers "really care" about their projects, they would accept valid contributions regardless origin. Well, turn it around: if you really care so much about contributing, if you really just wanna HeLP, you don't need the credit. The warm fuzzy feeling that your contribution ended up being used should be enough.

> Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”.

I've heard this in a lot of places, don't have a way to verify this in action. Do you have any citation or just gut feel (still valid but less useful for me).

Anecdotally, as someone who's been starting to get more and more agent-only/driven PRs, a good amount of the time it's by an account with little to no activity until one day they suddenly start doing 50-100+ PRs a _day_ on entirely unrelated projects... you can kind of guess what they're doing.

As for motive, it probably varies, though some will loudly put that they're some agent manager or something with lots of contributions, so you can guess their motivations there.

In other cases, these are instrad brand-new accounts which is a related but I guess slightly different story... not gonna say these are spam bot accounts being juiced with fake activity but well...

These are all fair observations, I have not personally come across these yet but I am also not looking for them. I guess someone more involved in open source collaboration would have a better lens here.

There was this attempt (attack?) on Fedora in June: https://lwn.net/Articles/1077035/

Just had a thought, what if you made new contributors write a human-authored essay on why they’re submitting a patch, and then check it against Pangram? Pangram is really accurate from what I’ve found…

> Just had a thought, what if you made new contributors write a human-authored essay on why they’re submitting a patch, and then check it against Pangram?

The problem is writing such an essay takes magnitudes more of an effort for people who are not native English (or whatever the language is in which discussions are done about the project) speakers.

Also, relatedly, essays written by non-native English speakers often get considered to be AI-written by common AI detection systems, even though no AI was involved when writing them; see for example

> I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

> https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...

I’m as skeptical of the AI writing detection as anyone else, but I’ve been trying to beat Pangram v4 for the last week and it’s essentially impossible.

Have you tried in both directions though? You need to test both sensitivity and specificity.

Yes. It’s scarily accurate.

They have a blog post on it if you look up “Pangram v4 System Card“

Well historically the consensus was that it was harder to read code than to write it, but that leads to uncomfortable conclusions these days, so that bit of common wisdom has mostly been ejected.

> I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?

I’m not trying to be mean, but this comment is basically “I have no experience with this topic, but it can just be boiled down to this one simple question right?”

I don't think that's being mean at all, and it's valid.

Yes that's literally why I asked it. Simple questions, here, regularly elicit long form explanations. I was interested in this topic and have no experience. So I thought I'd try a broad overview type question to see if I could learn something today.

I think I read it as a bit more flippant than you meant it because it was worded assuming the answer was yes.

It's a well-known trope, that it's harder to read code than to write it, and review is more complicated than to read it, so I do not understand what you want to imply?

Maybe it is for people who have written code all their lives, but as someone who started with reading code and has read far more code than I’ve ever written, reading code is WAY easier for me.

If you have little experience writing code, do you know that you actually understand what you’re reading though?

For example could you reproduce the code you read immediately after writing it?

It’s very easy to “read code” if you’re just reading for surface level understanding.

If it's easier for you to convert written code into mental models than the other way around, you are either a incredible smart and skilled person and a good programmer and should be able to convert that into a job and money easily, or you can't really write code at all.

> The question becomes [...]

"A question is...". To my mind not the most important question, if one plays-out to a logical conclusion the scenario you're proposing.

> [...] if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct?

No - and that's bordering-on (if not fully) rude disrespect of reviewers time and effort. One way to think of this is in terms of Brandolinis Law[0]. Pushing work back to submitters is going to have to happen. Low-effort "submissions" are first and foremost "low-effort" - that's going to have to be driven home.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

Even before automation, most first time PRs were a negative time contribution to the project. The only value of them was that some contributors would become trusted project members.

Probably a time waster because of the intermediate patch contributor. It’s like a game of telephone at worst, at best the reviewer could just use their own LLM and get the same result.

Here’s my hot take: maybe code contributions are obsoleted by coding agents. No one will accept outside contributions because it’s faster to do it themselves.

It depends entirely on how much slop they are flooded with.

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