[Version467]

The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroughly tested and reviewed pieces of code I have ever written. I just really, really don't want to bother someone with low quality "help" who graciously offers their time to work on open source stuff.

Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I've definitely been caught off guard by it.

[mg794613]

It's because a lot of people that werent skilful werent on your path before. Now that pandora's box has been re-opened, those people feel "they get a second chance at life". It's not that they have no shame, they have no perspective to put that shame.

You on the other hand, have for many years honed your craft. The more you learn, the more you discover to learn aka , you realize how little you know. They don't have this. _At all_. They see this as a "free ticket to the front row" and when we politely push back (we should be way harsher in this, its the only language they understand) all they hear is "he doesn't like _me_." which is an escape.

You know how much work you ask of me, when you open a PR on my project, they don't. They will just see it as "why don't you let me join, since I have AI I should have the same skill as you".... unironically.

In other words, these "other people" that we talk about haven't worked a day in the field in their life, so they simply don't understand much of it, however they feel they understand everything of it.

[nlh]

This is so completely spot on. It’s happening in other fields too, particularly non-coding (but still otherwise specialized or technical) areas. AI is extremely empowering but what’s happening is that people are now showing up in all corners of the world armed with their phone at the end of their outstretched arm saying “Well ChatGPT says…” and getting very upset when told that, no, many apologies, but ChatGPT is wrong here too.

[johnnyanmac]

That all makes sense. But the more I know, the more I realize that a lot of software engineering isn't about crazy algorithms and black magic. I'd argue a good 80% of it is the ability to pick up the broken glass, something even many students can pull off. 15% of that comes down to avoiding landmines in a large field as you pick up said glass.

But that care isn't even evident here. People submitting prs that don't even compile, bug reports for issues that may not even exist. The minimum I'd expect is to check the work of whatever you vibe coded. We can't even get that. It's some. Odd form of clout chasing as if repos are a factor of success, not what you contribute to them.

[BlackjackCF]

I find that interesting because for the first 10 years of my career, I didn’t feel any confidence in contributing to open source at all because I didn’t feel I had the expertise to do so. I was even reluctant to file bugs because I always figured I was on the wrong and I didn’t want to cause churn for the maintainers.

[alfalfasprout]

This is easily the most spot-on comment I've read on HN in a long time.

The humility of understanding what you don't know and the limitations of that is out the window for many people now. I see time and time again the idea that "expertise is dead". Yet it's crystal clear it's not. But those people cannot understand why.

It all boils down to a simple reality: you can't understand why something is fundamentally bad if you don't understand it at all.

[ThrowawayR2]

It's not as if there weren't that sort of people in our profession even before the rise of LLMs, as evidenced by the not infrequent comments about "gatekeeping" and "nobody needs to know academic stuff in a real day-to-day job" on HN.

[monegator]

> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have.

ever had a client second guess you by replying you a screenshot from GPT?

ever asked anything in a public group only to have a complete moron replying you with a screenshot from GPT or - at least a bit of effor there - a copy/paste of the wall of text?

no, people have no shame. they have a need for a little bit of (borrowed) self importance and validation.

Which is why i applaud every code of conduct that has public ridicule as punishment for wasting everybody's time

[Sharlin]

Problem is people seriously believe that whatever GPT tells them must be true, because… I don't even know. Just because it sounds self-confident and authoritative? Because computers are supposed to not make mistakes? Because talking computers in science fiction do not make mistakes like that? The fact that LLMs ended up having this particular failure mode, out of all possible failure modes, is incredibly unfortunate and detrimental to the society.

[TeMPOraL]

This sounds a bit like the "Asking vs. Guessing culture" discussion on the front page yesterday. With the "Guesser" being GP who's front-loading extra investigation, debugging and maintenance work so the project maintainers don't have to do it, and with the "Asker" being the client from your example, pasting the submission to ChatGPT and forwarding its response.

[ncruces]

I've also had the opposite.

I raise an issue or PR after carefully reviewing someone else's open source code.

They ask Claude to answer me; neither them nor Claude understood the issue.

Well, at least it's their repo, they can do whatever.

[monooso]

Not OP, but I don't consider these the same thing.

The client in your example isn't a (presumably) professional developer, submitting code to a public repository, inviting the scrutiny of fellow professionals and potential future clients or employers.

[meindnoch]

Our CEO chiming in on a technical discussion between engineers: by the way, this is what Claude says: *some completely made-up bullshit*

[positive-spite]

Didn't happen to me yet.

I'm not looking forward to it...

[Aeolun]

Random people don’t do this. Your boss however…

[flexagoon]

Keep in mind that many people also contribute to big open source projects just because they believe it will look good ok their CV/GitHub and help them get a job. They don't care about helping anyone, they just want to write "contributed to Ghostty" in their application.

[nchmy]

I think this falls under the "have no shame" comment that they made

[wccrawford]

It's worse. Some of them are required to contribute to an existing project of their choice for some course they're taking.

[0x696C6961]

From my experience, it's not about helping anyone or CV building. I just ran into a bug or a missing feature that is blocking me.

[ionwake]

TBH Im not sure if this is a "growing up in a good area" vibe. But over the last decade or so I have had to slowly learn the people around me have no sense of shame. This wasnt their fault, but mine. Society has changed and if you don't adapt you'll end up confused and abused.

I am not saying one has to lose their shame, but at best, understand it.

[pousada]

Like with all things in life shame is best in moderation.

Too little or too much shame can lead to issue.

Problem is no one tells you what too little or too much actually is and there are many different situations where you need to figure it out on your own.

So I think sometimes people just get it wrong but ultimately everyone tries their best. Truly malicious shameless people are extremely rare in my experience.

For the topic at hand I think a lot of these “shameless” contributions come from kids

[wang_li]

The adaption is going to be that competent, knowledgeable people will begin forming informal and formal networks of people they know are skilled and intelligent and begin to scorn the people who aren't skilled and aren't intelligent. They will be less willing to work with people who don't have a proven record of competence. This results in greater stratification and harder for people who aren't already part of the in group to break in.

[derrida]

Shame is a good thing it shows one has a conscience and positive self regard.

Just like pain is a good thing, it tells you and signals to remove your hand from the stove.

[Wojtkie]

It doesn't help that it seems like society has been trending to reward individuals with a lack of shame. Fortune favors the bold, that is.

Think of a lot of the inflammatory content on social media, how people have made whole careers and fortunes over outrage, and they have no shame over it.

It really does begin to look like having a good sense of shame isn't rewarded in the same way.

[pepperball]

Lack of shame, and antisocial behavior in general are also directly economically rewarded nowadays thanks to the attention economy.

[Etheryte]

I worked for a major open-source company for half a decade. Everyone thinks their contribution is a gift and you should be grateful. To quote Bo Burnham, "you think your dick is a gift, I promise it's not".

[latexr]

> To quote Bo Burnham, "you think your dick is a gift, I promise it's not".

For those curious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llGvsgN17CQ

[Cthulhu_]

Sounds like everyone's got some main character syndrome, the cure for that is to be a meaningless cog in the enterprise wheels for a while. But then I suspect a lot of open source contributions are done exactly by those people - they don't really matter in their day job, but in open source they can Make A Difference.

Of course, the vast majority of OS work is the same cog-in-a-machine work, and with low effort AI assisted contributions, the non-hero-coding work becomes more prevalent than ever.

[vanderZwan]

Kind of by definition we will not see the people who do not submit frivolous PRs that waste the time of other people. So keep in mind that there's likely a huge amount of survivor bias involved.

Just like with email spam I would expect that a big part of the issue is that it only takes a minority of shameless people to create a ton of contribution spam. Unlike email spam these people actually want their contributions to be tied to their personal reputation. Which in theory means that it should be easier to identify and isolate them.

[bgro]

All email is spam.

[kleiba]

"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.)

It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.

[benldrmn]

Funny, I had a similar experience TAing “Intro to CS” (first semester C programming course). The student was certain he encountered a compiler bug (pushing back on my assumption there was something wrong with their code, since while compilers do have bugs, they are probably not in the code generation of a nested for loop). After spending a few minutes parsing their totally unindented code, the off-by-one error revealed itself

[JDye]

Our postgres replication suddenly stopped working and it took three of us hours - maybe days - of looking through the postgres source before we actually accepted it wasn't us or our hosting provider being stupid and submitted a ticket.

I can't imagine the level of laziness or entitlement required for a student (or any developer) to blame their tools so quickly without conducting a thorough investigation.

[xxs]

have found bugs in native JVM, usually it takes some effort, though. Printing the assembly is the easiest one. (I consider the bug in java.lang/util/io/etc. code not an interesting case)

Memory leaks and issues with the memory allocator are months long process to pin on the JVM...

In the early days (bug parade times), the bugs are a lot more common, nowadays -- I'd say it'd be an extreme naivete to consider JVM the culprit from the get-go.

[Ronsenshi]

It's good to regularly see such policies and discussions around them to remind me how staggeringly shameless some people could be and how many of such people out there. Interacting mostly with my peers, friends, acquaintances I tend to forget that they don't represent average population and after some time I start to assume all people are reasonable and act in good faith.

[toyg]

Yep, this. You can just look at the state of FOSS licensing across GitHub to see it in action: licenses are routinely stripped or changed to remove the original developers, even on trivial items, even on forked projects where the action is easily visible, even on licenses that allow for literally everything else. State "You can do everything except this" and loads of people will still actively do it, because they have no shame (or because they enjoy breaking someone else's rules? Because it gives them a power trip? Who knows).

[jm4]

Some people just want their name in the contributor list, whether it's for ego, to build a portfolio, etc. I think that's what it comes down to. Many projects, especially high profile ones, have to deal with low effort contributions - correcting spelling mistakes, reformatting code, etc. It's been going on for a long time. The Linux contributor guidelines - probably a lot of other projects too - specifically call this stuff out and caution people not to do it lest they suffer the wrath of the LKML. AI coding tools open up all kinds of new possibilities for these types of contributors, but it's not AI that's the problem.

[Aurornis]

A subset of open source contributors are only interested in getting something accepted so they can put it on their resume.

Any smart interviewer knows that you have to look at actual code of the contributions to confirm it was actually accepted and that it was a non-trivial change (e.g. not updating punctuation in the README or something).

In my experience this is where the PR-spammers fall apart in interviews. When they proudly tell you they’re a contributor to a dozen popular projects and you ask for direct links to their contributions, they start coming up with excuses for why they can’t find them or their story changes.

There are of course lazy interviewers who will see the resume line about having contributed to popular projects and take it as strong signal without second guessing. That’s what these people are counting on.

[Sharlin]

You just have to go take a look at what people write in social media, using their real name and photo, to conclude that no, some people have no shame at all.

[nobodywillobsrv]

I would imagine there are a lot of "small nice to haves" that people submit because they are frustrated about the mere complexity of submitting changes. Minor things that involve a lot of complexity merely in terms of changing some config or some default etc. Something where there is a significant probability of it being wrong but also a high probability of someone who knows the project being able to quickly see if it's ok or not.

i.e. imagine a change that is literally a small diff, that is easy to describe as a mere user and not a developer, and that requires quite a lot of deep understanding merely to submit as a PR (build the project! run the tests! write the template for the PR!).

Really a lot of this stuff ends up being a kind of failure mode of various projects that we all fall into at some point where "config" is in the code and what could be a simple change and test required a lot of friction.

Obviously not all submissions are going to be like this but I think I've tried a few little ones like that where I would normally just leave whatever annoyance I have alone but think "hey maybe it's 10 min faff with AI and a PR".

The structure of the project incentives kind of creates this. Increasing cost to contribution is a valid strategy of course, but from a holistic project point of view it is not always a good one especially assuming you are not dealing with adversarial contributors but only slightly incompetent ones.

[DrewADesign]

To have that shame, you need to know better. If you don’t know any better, having access to a model that can make code and a cursory understanding of the language syntax probably feels like knowing how to write good code. Dunning-Krueger strikes again.

I’ll bet there are probably also people trying to farm accounts with plausible histories for things like anonymous supply chain attacks.

[arbitrandomuser]

when it comes to enabling opportunities i dont think it becomes a matter of shame for them anymore. A lot of people (especially in regions where living is tough and competition is fierce) will do anything by hook or crook to get ahead in competition. And if github contributions is a metric for getting hired or getting noticed then you are going to see it become spammed.

[SpecialistK]

Funny enough, reading this makes me feel a little more confident and less... shame.

I've been deep-diving into AI code generation for more niche platforms, to see if it can either fill the coding gap in my skillset, or help me learn more code. And without writing my whole blog post(s) here, it's been fairly mediocre but improving over time.

But for the life of me I would never submit PRs of this code. Not if I can't explain every line and why it's there. And in preparation of publishing anything to my own repos I have a readme which explicitly states how the code was generated and requesting not to bother any upstream or community members with issues from it. It's just (uncommon) courtesy, no?

[kkukshtel]

This is one thing I find funny about all the discussion around AI watermarking. Yes for absolutely nefarious bad actors it is incredibly important, but what seems clear is that the majority of AI users do absolutely nothing to conceal obvious tells of AI generation. Turns out people are shameless!

Two immediate ones I can think of:

- The yellow hue/sepia tone of any image coming out of ChatGPT

- People responding to text by starting with "Good Question!" or inserting hard-to-memorize-or-type unicode symbols like → into text where they obviously wouldn't have used that and have no history of using it.

[wnevets]

> how little shame people apparently have

You can expand this sentiment to everyday life. The things some people are willing to say and do in public is a never ending supply of surprising.

[pil0u]

The major companies that made available the very tools they use to create this spam code, applied the exact same ethics.

[hintymad]

> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have

My guess is that those people have different incentives. They need to build a portfolio of open-source contributions, so shame is not of their concern. So, yeah, where you stand depends on where you sit.

[6LLvveMx2koXfwn]

Shamelessness is very definitely in vogue at the moment. It will pass, let's hope for more than ruins.

[pixl97]

To put this another way, shame is only effective if it's coupled with other repercussions with long standing effects.

An example I have of this is from high school where there were guys that were utterly shameless in asking girls for sex. The thing is it worked for them. Regardless of how many people turned them down they got enough of a hit rate it was an effective strategy. Simply put there was no other social mechanism that provided enough disincentive to stop them.

And to take the position as devil's advocate, why should they feel shame? Shame is typically a moral construct of the culture you're raised in and what to be ashamed for can vary widely.

For example, if your raised in the culture of Abrahamic religions it's very likely you're told to be ashamed for being gay. Whereas non-religious upbringing is more likely to say why the hell would you be ashamed for being gay.

TL:DR, shame is not an effective mechanism on the internet because you're dealing with far too many cultures that have wildly different views on shame, and any particular viewpoint on shame is apt to have millions to billions of people that don't believe the same.

[micromacrofoot]

It's because the AI is generating code better than they would write, and if you don't like it then that's fine... they didn't write it

it's easy to not have shame when you have no skin in the game... this is similar to how narcissists think so highly of themselves, it's never their fault

[quanwinn]

I'm not surprised. Lower barrier of entry -- thanks to AI in this case -- often leads to a decrease in quality in most things.

[slfreference]

https://x.com/JDHamkins/status/2014085911110131987

I am seeing the doomed future of AI math: just received another set theory paper by a set theory amateur with an AI workflow and an interest in the continuum hypothesis.

At first glance, the paper looks polished and advanced. It is beautifully typeset and contains many correct definitions and theorems, many of which I recognize from my own published work and in work by people I know to be expert. Between those correct bits, however, are sprinkled whole passages of claims and results with new technical jargon. One can't really tell at first, but upon looking into it, it seems to be meaningless nonsense. The author has evidently hoodwinked himself.

We are all going to be suffering under this kind of garbage, which is not easily recognizable for the slop it is without effort. It is our regrettable fate.

[lm28469]

Lots of people cosplay as developers, and "contributing" to open source is a box they must check. It's like they go through the moves without understanding they're doing the opposite of what they should be doing. Same with having a tech blog, they don't understand that the end goal is not "having a blog" but "producing and sharing quality content"

[OGEnthusiast]

> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have.

My guess is it's mostly people from countries with a culture that reward shameless behavior.

[guerrilla]

> Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all.

I think this is interesting too. I've noticed the difference in dating/hook-up contexts. The people you're talking about also end up getting laid more but that group also has a very large intersection with sex pests and other shitty people. The thing they have in common though is that they just don't care what other people think about them. That leads some of them to be successful if they are otherwise good people... or to become borderline or actual crininals if not. I find it fascinating actually, like how does this difference come about and can it actually be changed or is it something we get early in life or from the genetic lottery.

[GardenLetter27]

The Internet (and developer communities) used to be a high trust society - mostly academics and developers, everyone with shared experiences of learning when it was harder to get resources, etc.

The grift culture has changed that completely, now students face a lot of pressure to spam out PRs just to show they have contributed something.

[postepowanieadm]

If you are from poor society you can't afford to have shame. You either succeed or fail, again and again, and keep trying.

[MrBuddyCasino]

In other news, wet roads cause rain.

[weinzierl]

"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have."

And this is one half of why I think

"Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public."

isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.

[anonymous908213]

> The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior.

Shaming people for violating valid social norms is absolutely decent behaviour. It is the primary mechanism we have to establish social norms. When people do bad things that are harmful to the rest of society, shaming them is society's first-level corrective response to get them to stop doing bad things. If people continue to violate norms, then society's higher levels of corrective behaviour can involve things like establishing laws and fining or imprisoning people, but you don't want to start with that level of response. Although putting these LLM spammers in jail does sound awfully enticing to me in a petty way, it's probably not the most constructive way to handle the problem.

The fact that shamelessness is taking over in some cultures is another problem altogether, and I don't know how you deal with that. Certain cultures have completely abdicated the ability to influence people's behaviour socially without resorting to heavy-handed intervention, and on the internet, this becomes everyone in the world's problem. I guess the answer is probably cultivation of spaces with strict moderation to bar shameless people from participating. The problem could be mitigated to some degree if a Github-like entity outright banned these people from their platform so they could not continue to harass open-source maintainers, but there is no platform like that. It unfortunately takes a lot of unrewarding work to maintain a curated social environment on the internet.

[wpietri]

No society can function without enforced rules. Most people do the pro-social thing most of the time. But for the rest, society must create negative experiences that help train people to do the right thing.

What negative experience do you think should instead be created for people breaking these rules?

[conartist6]

Getting to live by the rules of decency is a privilege now denied us. I can accept that but I don't have to like it or like the people who would abuse my trust for their personal gain.

Tit for tat