Of course, but when you add enough noise you lose the signal and as a consequence no PRs gets merged anymore because it's too much effort to just find the ones you care about.
Don't allow PR's from people who aren't contributors, problem solved. Closing your doors to the public is exactly how people solved the "dark forest" problem of social media and OSS was already undergoing that transition with humans authoring garbage PRs for reasons other than genuine enthusiasm. AI will only get us to the destination faster.
I don't think anything of value will be lost by choosing to not interact with the unfettered masses whom millions of AI bots now count among their number.
That would be a huge loss IMO. Anyone being able to contribute to projects is what makes open source so great. If we all put up walls, then you're basically halfway to the bad old days of closed source software reigning supreme.
Then there's the security concerns that this change would introduce. Forking a codebase is easy, but so are supply chain attacks, especially when some projects are being entirely iterated on and maintained by Claude now.
And how does one become a maintainer, if there's no way to contribute from outside? Even if there's some extensive "application process", what is the motivation for a relatively new user to go through that, and how do they prove themselves worthy without something very much like a PR process? Are we going to just replace PRs with a maze of countless project forks, and you think that will somehow be better, for either users or developers?
If I wanted to put up with software where every time I encounter a bug, I either have no way at all to report it, or perhaps a "reporting" channel but little likelihood of convincing the developers that this thing that matters to me is worthy of attention among all of their competing priorities, then I might as well just use Microsoft products. And frankly, I'd rather run my genitals though an electric cheese grater.
Spivak|13 days ago
I don't think anything of value will be lost by choosing to not interact with the unfettered masses whom millions of AI bots now count among their number.
nunez|13 days ago
Then there's the security concerns that this change would introduce. Forking a codebase is easy, but so are supply chain attacks, especially when some projects are being entirely iterated on and maintained by Claude now.
repstosb|12 days ago
If I wanted to put up with software where every time I encounter a bug, I either have no way at all to report it, or perhaps a "reporting" channel but little likelihood of convincing the developers that this thing that matters to me is worthy of attention among all of their competing priorities, then I might as well just use Microsoft products. And frankly, I'd rather run my genitals though an electric cheese grater.