Post

2 questions 1) How would you like to see new people get involved in open source in a helpful, positive, and productive manner? 2) What tools would you like to see?

new folks are helpful to a project when they put real effort on whatever they want to bring to the table. It can be helping others in the community, sharing their experience to improve things, and if they want to fix issues or implement features, understand that generating code isn't the bottleneck

If PRs needs to be locked, there should be new tools to let people into the project in an easy way, and that let maintainers interact with these potential contributors (chat, calls, more conversational focus on issues) so they're able to get to know them and move them to a trusted party

I fully agree, but after having done this myself, I have found people still try to provide AI slop via an issue with a link to the diff of their fork and the main repo, and mentioning they can't create a PR. This means the noise is still there, sadly. Have you found a way to prevent this?

That's a bummer. I don't know how we fight that. We need better tools, an issues sandbox for a start. Better comms tools to talk to these contributors about what they're trying to do and not their generated code.

The flue project has an interesting take. It doesn't accept PRs (except for a few). PRs are transformed into discussions and then iterated by an agent and supervised by the owner of the project.

Fight slop with slop

sarcasm?

Nope, there's no reason you should be carefully reading and understanding walls of text when you have tools to summarize and review for you.

3 times now I've seen an author (very obviously an agent acting on behalf of the account owner) close its own PR after it realized it had violated the AI policy. Overall those PRs were a waste of time, but it does make me think that writing docs for agents can possibly help stop low-effort spam PRs.

AI policies are a good step. I imagine you saw AI Contribution Policies already. They don't seem to be working to stop the slop, though.

the vitest team decided to lock PRs

didn’t lock it, it’s more of an approve-first approach rather than just leaving all PRs open for an eventual review PRs are still there, they are just closed

I get it, but it still sucks :(

we were talking about this with @vladimir.berlin and @bluwy.me. i've always pushed back against locking PRs. i feared it would make the barrier higher for new folks to join open source communities. but if their work is covered by noise, other avenues than PRs to gain trust may end up helping them

Do you want to talk to us about it? We'd love to get something out on our channel

My current hatred is slop accounts just targeting any "good first issue" or "help wanted" labelled issue. They usually have zero interest in actually working with the project. I'm not sure what the grift is yet though

I think the main grift is still generating activity to use GitHub when looking for a job. Some of it may be people that think they are actually helping, but I don't think they would continue after so many maintainers tell them to stop, though.

maintainers are starting to ignore PRs altogether as the chance to find a real caring human on the other side is diminishing. being ignored is worse for new folks than having to go through a longer process to be able to contribute. communities will adapt, here hoping towards more human connection

By now I'd prefer a well written issue-description without PR. Let my own coding-agent write the implementation. Mixing pre- and post- agentic-AI workflows can cause a lot of friction.