Like, why on earth would I spent hours reviewing your PR that you/Claude took 5 minutes to write? I couldn't care less if it improves (best case scenario) my open source codebase, I simply don't enjoy the imbalance.
If the PR does what it says it does, why does it actually matter if it took 2 weeks or 2 minutes to put together, given that it's the equivalent level of quality on review?
For some people, the point was precisely to improve the software available to the global commons through a thriving and active open source effort. "Too many people are giving me too many high-quality PRs to review" is hardly something to complain about, even if you have to just pick them randomly to fit them in the time you have without AI (or other committers) to help review.
If your idea of open source is just to share the code you wanted to work on and ignore contributions, you can do that too. SQLite does that, after all.
You're right that the issue isn't how many minutes it took. The issue is that it's slop. Reviewing thousands of lines of crappy code is unpleasant whether they were autogenerated or painstakingly handcrafted. (Of course, few humans have the patience and resistance to learning to generate the amount of terrible code that AIs do routinely).
I would probably never be able to review this kind of code in open source projects without any financial compensation, because of that reason. Not because I don't like LLMs, not use LLMs, or think their code is of bad quality. But, while without LLMs I know there was a person who sat down and wrote all this in painstaking work, now I know that he or she barely steered a robot that wrote it. It may still be good work, and the steering and prompting is still work and requires skill, but for me I would not feel any emotional value in this code, and it would make it A LOT harder to gather motivation to review it. Interestingly, when I think about it, I realize that I would inherently have motivation to find out how the developer prompted the agent.
Like, you know, when I see a wooden statue of which I know it was designed and carved by someone in months of work, I could appreciate every single edge of the wood much more than if there's a statue that was designed by someone but carved by some kind of wooden CNC machine. It may be same statue and the same or even better quality, and it was still skillful work, but I lose my connection to it.
Can't quite pinpoint it, but for me, it seems, the human aspect is really important here, at least when it's about passion and motivation.
Maybe that made some sense, idk. I just wrote out of my ass.
My personal approach to open source is more or less that when I need a piece of software to exist that does not and there is no good reason to keep it private, it becomes open source. I don’t do it for fun, I do it because I need it and might as well share it. If someone sends me a patch that enhances my use case, I will work with them to incorporate it. If they send me a patch that only benefits them it becomes a calculus of how much effort would it take for me to review it. If the effort is high, my advice is to fork the project or make it easier for me to review. Granted I don’t maintain huge or vital projects, but that’s precisely why: I don’t need yet another programming language or runtime to exist and I wouldn’t want to work on one for fun.
Not everyone has the same motivations. I’ve done open source for fun, I’ve done it to unblock something at work, I’ve done it to fix something that annoys me.
If your project is gaining useful functionality, that seems like a win.
Of course any chess bot is going to play better, but that's not the point
Because they're implicitly asking me to put in effort as a reviewer. Pretending that they put more effort in than they have is extremely rude, and intentionally or not, generating a large volume of code amounts to misleading your potential reviewers.
> If there was a huge amount of tedium that they used Claude Code for, then reviewed and cleaned up so that it’s indistinguishable from whatever you’d expect from a human; what’s it to you?
They never do though. These kind of imaginary good AI-based workflows are a "real communism has never been tried" thing.
> If your project is gaining useful functionality, that seems like a win.
Lines of code impose a maintenance cost, and that goes triple when the code quality is low (as is always the case for actually existing AI-generated code). The cost is probably higher than the benefit.
