Open Source Maintainer: Stop Flooding Our Projects with AI Slop to Pad Your CV
Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV
Neil Alexander, a maintainer of open source projects, says the pattern of external contributions has shifted dramatically: PRs instead of issues, AI-generated analyses attached to bug reports, and a surge of AI-generated security vulnerability reports. He describes a contributor who, after years of inactivity, submitted three PRs fixing typos in comments—fixes made by Claude, with commit trailers crediting the AI. Alexander closed the PRs without comment, wary of rewarding 'busywork' and gaming GitHub's contribution metrics. He argues that open source is built on trust, and that the real metric is whether you make a project meaningfully better, not how many PRs or CVEs you can accumulate.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but with the help of LLMs, you can effortlessly overstate your human abilities on your GitHub profile.
- alkonaut
Ironically this seems like a perfect use for AI from the maintaner side. "Find low-effort/AI-like PR's without associated issues from new contributors. Discuss with the contributors in the PR about how contributions should be made, then reject their PR's. If any bad behavior is detected in this interaction, block the accounts for 24 hours and add them to a list of accounts to review for permanent banning from the project".
Automated PR's can have automated responses. You make a human effort, you get a human response.
- neilv
IMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone.
Actually, if I see someone doing open source like it's a performative career checkbox, that will not be positive signal, and could easily be negative. I understand that people will do what they need to do to get a job, but that pragmatic career checkboxing itself isn't positive. I will have to look for positive signal elsewhere for that person.
The problem is that our industry has gotten very bad at hiring, and now we have everyone playing all sorts of games with it -- rehearsing Leetcode interviews, bad faith open source contributions, feigning enthusiasm, spamming AI-tweaked resumes, outright cheating on interviews -- rather than focusing on doing good work, and being part of a team.
If you're involved in hiring, and you care about effectiveness and culture, consider pushing back against the prevailing dysfunctional big-corporate-cattle-herding practices. Especially if your company has no excuse to be big-corporate dysfunctional, and can't afford to be.
- timokoesters
Hi Neil, fun to see you on HN. I agree with your points and I you summarized it very well as "Ultimately, open source is built on trust".
AI is destroying trust in open source and many other areas and I think this will discourage teams from publishing their source code in the future.
On the other hand, personal connections are becoming even more important, which is unfair to the younger generation and people who don't live near tech hubs.
- smooc
So the fixes are still fixes, but we (I am also a OSS maintainer) are unwilling to accept them as they boost the contributor’s status where we think the merit is very or extremely limited.
Why not have these PRs counted differently (by the platform), and/or colored differently in the timeline(s) thus made less visible or more clear?
- coder-pm
Hmm I thought the contribution graphs were always the currency, the only difference is that the AI made gaming them free:)
In my company we finally have it all documented, it’s super easy to find which PR made the regression and our internal policies and rules clearly state that you are the owner of the PR, not the AI so the ownership remains on human side, AI mistake is your mistake so everyone pays extra attention to that.
- unified101
Open source is solved. Human PRs are gunking up the process
PRs submission should be closed, and only issue submission, with a prompt to reccreate and fix the issue should be shared. This way the prompts users are using to do things - the real contribution - will make their way to maintainers who can then choose to convert it into a PR and merge.
- DarmokTanagra
Open source contributions as a signal of developer quality is a thing of the past.
Open source contribution on github specifically is no longer about building and maintaining something, its a parasocial signal that has more in common with linkedin hustle bloggers.
- ChuckMcM
I think the author meant 'burnish' there, which is a clever way of showing they didn't use AI :-)