The primary spam problem isn't that a single account opens many pull requests on a single repo, but that spammer accounts open many pull requests spread across many repositories. So limiting accounts to a couple of open PRs on my repository won't help much.
I'd rather enforce a limit based on the number of PRs that account opened across all public repositories it doesn't have write access to within the last week. And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow (perhaps via a "close as unwelcome" option for the maintainer).
> And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow
That strikes me as a bad solution. I've sent plenty of PRs over the last two decades that were things I wasn't sure if upstream wanted or not, but I did the work and wanted to offer it to them. If you get penalized for not having a PR merged, it's going to incentivize selfishness
If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?
This is a band-aid. Maybe even a good band-aid, because it'll keep individual contributors from flooring the zone. But the core problem is Github's model that assumes code is worth reading.
I'm much rather see the agent logs stapled to PRs. Make it easy to understand if there's a brain behind the suggested changes before engaging.
> If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?
This is the fundamental problem. You have to look at the equilibrium. When you submit a PR, you're asking for some of my time. I have to figure out if it's likely to be worth it for me. If you have a track record of producing useful software that I have merged before, you're putting your reputation at risk when you submit a new PR, so it's probably good. If you start sending AI slop, I'm going to downgrade your reputation.
If you have no track record though, I'll probably at least take a glance since even if I'm not sure, at least you had to spend some time to write the code and put together the PR. Now that's not true.
My guess is we're going to have to create some new systems for reputation, maybe bond posting, maybe "sponsored" PRs, where someone trusted vouches for it, etc.
Incidentally, this doesn't just apply to PRs. It's emails, all kinds of other messages, reports, etc.
I think this is a really solid move. This gives OSS contributors a lot of flexibility. You could set the limit to 0, and manually add contributors. You could set it to 1-3 to allow people to get their foot in the door. But the de facto limit today is infinite, which is spammed. Imagine if GMail did this! If I don't whitelist or reply within `n` emails, youre done. I would KILL for that.
I don't often give GitHub credit, because I work with it every day and I encounter something frustrating or broken nearly every day ending in "day", but kudos to them for working on addressing the some of the big problems.
I also like the other features mentioned in the blog post. It won't make a difference to me and my daily work, but I'm glad that they are taking the criticisms seriously.
Though I have to admit that I'm a bit conflicted about this. Part of me also wants more people to move off of GitHub to help break their monopoly on code on the web, but I also don't want the people making and maintaining open source to give up their projects due to burnout and slop spam.
We should have agents to triage PRs. Their "smarter bypass signals" is already implemented by Mitchell Hashimoto's Vouch system: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch
I think, amusingly, the right thing to do for most open-source projects is to have each pull request summary and code read by an agent that just reimplements itself from a description of what the code is intended to be. Other people's code is not particularly valuable anymore.
There are some projects where you can provide a PR and they'll just reimplement and I think that's probably adaptive to the world where PR's are cheap and reviews are expensive.
There is also the solution of: No merge requests, just feature wishes and bug reports. All code is written solely by the maintainers (with the help of LLMs).
I actually do that quite often these days. Keeping synced with upstream is trivial these days with a modern agent. Even just pi with DeepSeek V4 Flash can do it. It's a huge free-rider issue, but there's no way for me to contribute even human changes upstream because I'll be lost in the AI contributions so I don't bother.
So almost everything is forked and I then just have the agent keep my changes in sync with upstream. Works like a charm. I suspect my pattern is commonplace.
Yep, same here. I hate it a lot, but it's the new reality. It's easier/better for me to just fork, change whatever the hell I want, and push it to my fork. If I become away that upstream wants it I'm happy to put in the work to get a clean merge, but I'm not wasting anymore time pushing things upstream without some indicator that my time is valued by them. Been burned too many time now. It wasn't this way pre-AI, but AI peed in the pool and there isn't a good way to clean it yet
Why fork at all? Why not just vendor the dependency and slop the changes you want on top of it? You can even pull from upstream down the line for the latest updates.
The problem is sloppers really, really want other people to use their code, so they feel useful for doing a bit of prompting, probably to rationalize how much they pay Anthropic et al to do the actual work for them. I just wish they'd direct that money directly to the projects they find useful instead of trying to insert themselves as middlemen.
Some people have tokens but no money. Tokens, like Amazon gift cards and Tide detergent [1], are a form of currency in a way. If people have a currency equivalent they want to spend for your benefit, or the collective benefit, it makes sense (depending on level of effort) to enable them to do so.
(edit: maybe put AI tokens on stablecoin rails as value tokens? could be fun, could move them around instantly between participants on the value rails and could consume them programmatically, if someone implements this idea, buy me a beer!)
Well, yes, exactly. And yet nobody but the biggest corp-sponsored projects get anything more than negligible donations. So what does this tell us? These "contributors" are happy to throw money at open source projects as long as they think they're doing something by prompting the LLM?
The primary spam problem isn't that a single account opens many pull requests on a single repo, but that spammer accounts open many pull requests spread across many repositories. So limiting accounts to a couple of open PRs on my repository won't help much.
I'd rather enforce a limit based on the number of PRs that account opened across all public repositories it doesn't have write access to within the last week. And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow (perhaps via a "close as unwelcome" option for the maintainer).
> And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow
That strikes me as a bad solution. I've sent plenty of PRs over the last two decades that were things I wasn't sure if upstream wanted or not, but I did the work and wanted to offer it to them. If you get penalized for not having a PR merged, it's going to incentivize selfishness
If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?
This is a band-aid. Maybe even a good band-aid, because it'll keep individual contributors from flooring the zone. But the core problem is Github's model that assumes code is worth reading.
I'm much rather see the agent logs stapled to PRs. Make it easy to understand if there's a brain behind the suggested changes before engaging.
> If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?
This is the fundamental problem. You have to look at the equilibrium. When you submit a PR, you're asking for some of my time. I have to figure out if it's likely to be worth it for me. If you have a track record of producing useful software that I have merged before, you're putting your reputation at risk when you submit a new PR, so it's probably good. If you start sending AI slop, I'm going to downgrade your reputation.
If you have no track record though, I'll probably at least take a glance since even if I'm not sure, at least you had to spend some time to write the code and put together the PR. Now that's not true.
My guess is we're going to have to create some new systems for reputation, maybe bond posting, maybe "sponsored" PRs, where someone trusted vouches for it, etc.
Incidentally, this doesn't just apply to PRs. It's emails, all kinds of other messages, reports, etc.
I think this is a really solid move. This gives OSS contributors a lot of flexibility. You could set the limit to 0, and manually add contributors. You could set it to 1-3 to allow people to get their foot in the door. But the de facto limit today is infinite, which is spammed. Imagine if GMail did this! If I don't whitelist or reply within `n` emails, youre done. I would KILL for that.
I get a lot of emails that I want to get but never reply to. I would not want to have to remember to whitelist all of those.
Yeah fair, then you could set it higher, even 100. Or default it off.
HEY email service does something like that:
https://www.hey.com/features/the-screener/
I don't often give GitHub credit, because I work with it every day and I encounter something frustrating or broken nearly every day ending in "day", but kudos to them for working on addressing the some of the big problems.
I also like the other features mentioned in the blog post. It won't make a difference to me and my daily work, but I'm glad that they are taking the criticisms seriously.
Though I have to admit that I'm a bit conflicted about this. Part of me also wants more people to move off of GitHub to help break their monopoly on code on the web, but I also don't want the people making and maintaining open source to give up their projects due to burnout and slop spam.
We should have agents to triage PRs. Their "smarter bypass signals" is already implemented by Mitchell Hashimoto's Vouch system: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch
also, close all issues and open them as you plan to work on them.
Oh stop, the noise is apart of your business model to stay relevant.
how so?
I think, amusingly, the right thing to do for most open-source projects is to have each pull request summary and code read by an agent that just reimplements itself from a description of what the code is intended to be. Other people's code is not particularly valuable anymore.
There are some projects where you can provide a PR and they'll just reimplement and I think that's probably adaptive to the world where PR's are cheap and reviews are expensive.
There is also the solution of: No merge requests, just feature wishes and bug reports. All code is written solely by the maintainers (with the help of LLMs).
I believe that SQLite is like this. All code is internally written. Yep, also very reasonable. Amounts to how much external input you want, I suppose.
Add a mechanism to donate tokens towards the maintainers' LLMs for a particular ticket and this whole class of problems will be resolved all at once.
And creates a new class of problems. Why not just fork the project and modify it yourself at that point, and cut out the maintainer middleman.
I actually do that quite often these days. Keeping synced with upstream is trivial these days with a modern agent. Even just pi with DeepSeek V4 Flash can do it. It's a huge free-rider issue, but there's no way for me to contribute even human changes upstream because I'll be lost in the AI contributions so I don't bother.
So almost everything is forked and I then just have the agent keep my changes in sync with upstream. Works like a charm. I suspect my pattern is commonplace.
Yep, same here. I hate it a lot, but it's the new reality. It's easier/better for me to just fork, change whatever the hell I want, and push it to my fork. If I become away that upstream wants it I'm happy to put in the work to get a clean merge, but I'm not wasting anymore time pushing things upstream without some indicator that my time is valued by them. Been burned too many time now. It wasn't this way pre-AI, but AI peed in the pool and there isn't a good way to clean it yet
Because it is vibecoded garbage.
Why fork at all? Why not just vendor the dependency and slop the changes you want on top of it? You can even pull from upstream down the line for the latest updates.
The problem is sloppers really, really want other people to use their code, so they feel useful for doing a bit of prompting, probably to rationalize how much they pay Anthropic et al to do the actual work for them. I just wish they'd direct that money directly to the projects they find useful instead of trying to insert themselves as middlemen.
> Add a mechanism to donate tokens
Or donate money. Crazy idea, eh?
Some people have tokens but no money. Tokens, like Amazon gift cards and Tide detergent [1], are a form of currency in a way. If people have a currency equivalent they want to spend for your benefit, or the collective benefit, it makes sense (depending on level of effort) to enable them to do so.
[1] How Tide Detergent Became a Drug Currency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023204 - January 2013 (124 comments)
(edit: maybe put AI tokens on stablecoin rails as value tokens? could be fun, could move them around instantly between participants on the value rails and could consume them programmatically, if someone implements this idea, buy me a beer!)
> Some people have tokens but no money.
This sounds like a piece of worldbuilding from a Daniel Suarez novel. Who has tokens but no money?
That's the same as donating money, which you can already do.
Well, yes, exactly. And yet nobody but the biggest corp-sponsored projects get anything more than negligible donations. So what does this tell us? These "contributors" are happy to throw money at open source projects as long as they think they're doing something by prompting the LLM?
Being able to submit an issue, description, test criteria along with a token budget would be pretty cool.
There's an amusing attempt at this here: https://clevercrow.io/
It was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48621645
Thats just a coding agent the "peopple" use via you, with extra steps.