I've been seeing more and more open source maintainers throwing up their hands over AI generated pull requests. Going so far as to stop accepting PRs from external contributors.
This week we're going to begin automatically closing pull requests from external contributors. I hate this, sorry. pic.twitter.com/85GLG7i1fU
— tldraw (@tldraw) January 15,
Here’s the thing… code is much closer to doing group therapy than it is to flipping burgers. The final produced artifact is somewhat less important than converging on the tiny itty-bitty details of how to collaborate on the journey of getting there. This is especially true for open source projects.
Spending time trying to understand the perspective of a chatbot-managed contributor is a waste of time. You’re not going to be able to build a community around having a good developer experience for doing XYZ if half of the people weighing in on “how to do that” are not developers who are directly experiencing the thing they’re poking at.
Edit: Also, on testing specifically… this is something I see teams get wrong all the time. The real value of a test suite is not from making sure your system works correctly, but from making sure it’s easy to inspect how your system works. If it’s hard to write or modify tests, that’s an indication that you’ve got some unwieldy abstractions floating around. LLMs don’t care about whether the friction of test-writing is increasing.
Here’s the thing… code is much closer to doing group therapy than it is to flipping burgers. The final produced artifact is somewhat less important than converging on the tiny itty-bitty details of how to collaborate on the journey of getting there. This is especially true for open source projects.
Spending time trying to understand the perspective of a chatbot-managed contributor is a waste of time. You’re not going to be able to build a community around having a good developer experience for doing XYZ if half of the people weighing in on “how to do that” are not developers who are directly experiencing the thing they’re poking at.
Edit: Also, on testing specifically… this is something I see teams get wrong all the time. The real value of a test suite is not from making sure your system works correctly, but from making sure it’s easy to inspect how your system works. If it’s hard to write or modify tests, that’s an indication that you’ve got some unwieldy abstractions floating around. LLMs don’t care about whether the friction of test-writing is increasing.