PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

Retr0id

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.

runarberg

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...

j2kun

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.

fecal_henge

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

giancarlostoro

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.

janalsncm

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.

aniokono

What are the best solutions to this issue?

andix

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.

guidoiaquinti

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

benj111

Wait. So to combat AI spam there's AI agents to prevent it? Why can the anti spam agents not just do the work directly???

alexpotato

If anyone is interested in what it was like fighting spam in the early 2000s, I worked for a company that captured spam, analyzed it and then passed the analysis s on to the law firms of the big email providers for targeting under CAN-SPAM. Twitter thread about it below but happy to do a AMA here. https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1208948480867127296?s=20

elzbardico

I remember that on the not so early days of the internet around 1993, I managed to exchange emails with pretty much important people, known professionals and even got responses to my questions. It looked like a very very small world. Then, came the spam. I really hate the marketing people mindset. It fucks everything that is nice.

mrbonner

Fun fact: it is spam filtering application that makes Paul Graham famous (and rich)

cat_plus_plus

It's not at all like e-mail spam. Vast majority of contributors made a change useful for themselves that they wish to share with others. It's better to think of this as an influx of new programmers or existing programmers picking up new domains. They can be taught to use coding agents better and are likely to stick with projects that facilitate this rather than shutting them out. Maybe it's best for everyone. Let Linux kernel be super locked down to l33t contributors only and let alternative OSes that nobody paid attention to before gain new developers.

haneul

I didnt think about it this way, but it would be helpful to have infra around reputation in the same way email has them. And, it would be nice to have unsubscribe lists in the uBlock Origin style.

DeepYogurt

Why though? Is everyone karma farming? What's the motivator here?

usernametaken29

When the title said PR spam my first thought was the massive amount of scam posts released by Antrophic, OpenAI and a gazillion AI tools that solve all your problems (supposedly). Much to my surprise this was also an ad for an AI tool. Lowkey disappointing