The primary spam problem isn't that a single account opens many pull requests on a single repo, but those accounts open many pull requests spread across many repositories. So limiting accounts to a couple of open PRs on my repository won't help much.
I'd rather enforce a limit based on the number of PRs that account opened across all public repositories it doesn't have write access to within the last week. And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow (perhaps via a "close as unwelcome" option for the maintainer).
frankfrank13 56 minutes ago [-]
I think this is a really solid move. This gives OSS contributors a lot of flexibility. You could set the limit to 0, and manually add contributors. You could set it to 1-3 to allow people to get their foot in the door. But the de facto limit today is infinite, which is spammed. Imagine if GMail did this! If I don't whitelist or reply within `n` emails, youre done. I would KILL for that.
SoftTalker 35 minutes ago [-]
I get a lot of emails that I want to get but never reply to. I would not want to have to remember to whitelist all of those.
frankfrank13 31 minutes ago [-]
Yeah fair, then you could set it higher, even 100. Or default it off.
Why not make a pull request from a user new to the project cost $1?
Unfunkyufo 7 minutes ago [-]
I don't often give GitHub credit, because I work with it every day and I encounter something frustrating or broken nearly every day ending in "day", but kudos to them for working on addressing the some of the big problems.
I also like the other features mentioned in the blog post. It won't make a difference to me and my daily work, but I'm glad that they are taking the criticisms seriously.
Though I have to admit that I'm a bit conflicted about this. Part of me also wants more people to move off of GitHub to help break their monopoly on code on the web, but I also don't want the people making and maintaining open source to give up their projects due to burnout and slop spam.
esafak 14 minutes ago [-]
We should have agents to triage PRs. Their "smarter bypass signals" is already implemented by Mitchell Hashimoto's Vouch system: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch
cyanydeez 25 minutes ago [-]
also, close all issues and open them as you plan to work on them.
mbaloch2136 5 days ago [-]
[dead]
righthand 2 hours ago [-]
Oh stop, the noise is apart of your business model to stay relevant.
MeetingsBrowser 1 hours ago [-]
how so?
arjie 1 hours ago [-]
I think, amusingly, the right thing to do for most open-source projects is to have each pull request summary and code read by an agent that just reimplements itself from a description of what the code is intended to be. Other people's code is not particularly valuable anymore.
There are some projects where you can provide a PR and they'll just reimplement and I think that's probably adaptive to the world where PR's are cheap and reviews are expensive.
csiegert 1 hours ago [-]
There is also the solution of: No merge requests, just feature wishes and bug reports. All code is written solely by the maintainers (with the help of LLMs).
parliament32 60 minutes ago [-]
Add a mechanism to donate tokens towards the maintainers' LLMs for a particular ticket and this whole class of problems will be resolved all at once.
wereHamster 47 minutes ago [-]
> Add a mechanism to donate tokens
Or donate money. Crazy idea, eh?
toomuchtodo 22 minutes ago [-]
Some people have tokens but no money. Tokens, like Amazon gift cards and Tide detergent [1], are a form of currency in a way. If people have a currency equivalent they want to spend for your benefit, or the collective benefit, it makes sense (depending on level of effort) to enable them to do so.
And creates a new class of problems. Why not just fork the project and modify it yourself at that point, and cut out the maintainer middleman.
22 minutes ago [-]
parliament32 9 minutes ago [-]
Why fork at all? Why not just vendor the dependency and slop the changes you want on top of it? You can even pull from upstream down the line for the latest updates.
The problem is sloppers really, really want other people to use their code, so they feel useful for doing a bit of prompting, probably to rationalize how much they pay Anthropic et al to do the actual work for them. I just wish they'd direct that money directly to the projects they find useful instead of trying to insert themselves as middlemen.
geon 23 minutes ago [-]
Because it is vibecoded garbage.
esafak 23 minutes ago [-]
That's the same as donating money, which you can already do.
parliament32 17 minutes ago [-]
Well, yes, exactly. And yet nobody but the biggest corp-sponsored projects get anything more than negligible donations. So what does this tell us? These "contributors" are happy to throw money at open source projects as long as they think they're doing something by prompting the LLM?
57 minutes ago [-]
qazxcvbnmlp 1 hours ago [-]
Being able to submit an issue, description, test criteria along with a token budget would be pretty cool.
ramraj07 41 minutes ago [-]
Thats just a coding agent the "peopple" use via you, with extra steps.
1 hours ago [-]
faefox 20 minutes ago [-]
Charge $500 per PR, refundable if it's found to be of sufficient merit. $5000 per issue. Problem solved.
I'd rather enforce a limit based on the number of PRs that account opened across all public repositories it doesn't have write access to within the last week. And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow (perhaps via a "close as unwelcome" option for the maintainer).
https://www.hey.com/features/the-screener/
I also like the other features mentioned in the blog post. It won't make a difference to me and my daily work, but I'm glad that they are taking the criticisms seriously.
Though I have to admit that I'm a bit conflicted about this. Part of me also wants more people to move off of GitHub to help break their monopoly on code on the web, but I also don't want the people making and maintaining open source to give up their projects due to burnout and slop spam.
There are some projects where you can provide a PR and they'll just reimplement and I think that's probably adaptive to the world where PR's are cheap and reviews are expensive.
Or donate money. Crazy idea, eh?
[1] How Tide Detergent Became a Drug Currency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5023204 - January 2013 (124 comments)
The problem is sloppers really, really want other people to use their code, so they feel useful for doing a bit of prompting, probably to rationalize how much they pay Anthropic et al to do the actual work for them. I just wish they'd direct that money directly to the projects they find useful instead of trying to insert themselves as middlemen.