PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s (opens in new tab)

Maybe we should cut out the middle-man and make it easy for people to donate token credits to open-source projects, and let the maintainers decide how to use them.

I see one big difference: with email it was always about sender reputation based on email servers (IPs), maybe about domains. But never about individual users. It's the organizations running the email server, who make sure users behave. So they don't get blacklisted and lose sending privileges for hundreds or thousands of users.

For PRs/issues this is not applicable.

In my main project we added a new requirement that all new contributors meet a maintainer in a non-textual format before their first PR is merged. Seems to work well for a small project.

GitHub just recently added configurable PR limits for maintainers to help partially address this problem: https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/how-pull-request...

I understand this is a general problem in OSS, but I also hope the irony isn’t lost that this article is specifically complaining about AI slop PRs to the Open Claw repo.

If the maintainers are that tired of it, they should update OpenClaw to prevent it from submitting PRs to their repo.

Can I ask what the motive is to create agents to do this? Where is the profit?

What are the best solutions to this issue?

Does github not have rulesets for who can even try to do a PR? I would lockdown my repositories if I didn't want any PR slop.

AI agents who review the slop created by other AI agents is not the answer here.

I much prefer a blanket ban on PRs and issues created by AI agents (which is what I personally do for my repos; so far I have closed one[1]). In fact I would love a github alternative which considers AI contributions to be a breach of their terms of use and ban any people who let AI agents loose on their platform.

1: https://github.com/runarberg/markdown-it-math/pull/48#issuec...