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0 pointsjakolaptu22d ago0 comments

But your company employs said individual, whereas arbitrary drive-by patches from randos on open source projects with no consequence of submitting a mountain of garbage.

The answer: require a written proposal for changes before a patch will even be considered unless it is sufficiently small.

Also fight AI with AI: have a bot auto reject patches unless they can link to a previously approved enhancement document. Folks who commit minimal effort will f*ck right off.

Then the cognitive burden is focused on the ideas, and code authors should have at least conveyed the intent. If they actually care to invest their skin in the game then they need to collaborate and not just drop garbage on the front door.

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2 comments · 2 top-level

lucideer22d ago

just to clarify:

1. my company also employs its fair share of folk that would fit into the so-called "idiot" category of my post - I just thought it was of note that I have encountered exceptions to this stereotype

2. I fully support what Ladybird is doing here & find it unfortunate that they have to. I didn't intend my post to criticise their move - my example is definitely the rare exception in a sea of unmaintainable garbage. I do think however that it was already a challenging prospect to manage garbage oss prs in the pre-llm era (see umpteen posts on maintainer burnout) & I wouldn't have faulted any open source project for doing what ladybird is doing even pre-llm.

zzzeek22d ago

yes. github has very minimal controls for PRs (either shut them off completely, or not at all) but through GH webhooks you can essentially script "auto-close" of PRs that dont have correct preliminary approval.

it's time for there to be some really nice workflow tooling that people can plug into their GH repos that does this and other things.

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