The primary spam problem isn't that a single account opens many pull requests on a single repo, but that spammer 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).
Good point. I've (even with agents) never made more than like 5 PRs in one day internal to a company and if I have they typically included accompanying proto or submodule changes. Heck give a factor of safety of 2x and cap at 10 daily PRs per account for repos that youre "untrusted"
> And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow
That strikes me as a bad solution. I've sent plenty of PRs over the last two decades that were things I wasn't sure if upstream wanted or not, but I did the work and wanted to offer it to them. If you get penalized for not having a PR merged, it's going to incentivize selfishness
That's why I suggested an explicit "close as unwelcome" option (label to be bikeshed). And the impact of the rejection should decay over time.
In any case, my proposal is a rough sketch of how I'd approach the problem, not a production ready algorithm. But I'd expect even that basic approach to work a lot better than github's approach.
Hence the cooldown period? I think the mechanism proposed here should be perfectly fine for targeted PRs, while mitigating those that sit above baseline.
If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?
This is a band-aid. Maybe even a good band-aid, because it'll keep individual contributors from flooring the zone. But the core problem is Github's model that assumes code is worth reading.
I'm much rather see the agent logs stapled to PRs. Make it easy to understand if there's a brain behind the suggested changes before engaging.
> If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?
This is the fundamental problem. You have to look at the equilibrium. When you submit a PR, you're asking for some of my time. I have to figure out if it's likely to be worth it for me. If you have a track record of producing useful software that I have merged before, you're putting your reputation at risk when you submit a new PR, so it's probably good. If you start sending AI slop, I'm going to downgrade your reputation.
If you have no track record though, I'll probably at least take a glance since even if I'm not sure, at least you had to spend some time to write the code and put together the PR. Now that's not true.
My guess is we're going to have to create some new systems for reputation, maybe bond posting, maybe "sponsored" PRs, where someone trusted vouches for it, etc.
Incidentally, this doesn't just apply to PRs. It's emails, all kinds of other messages, reports, etc.
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.
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.
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
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).
I actually do that quite often these days. Keeping synced with upstream is trivial these days with a modern agent. Even just pi with DeepSeek V4 Flash can do it. It's a huge free-rider issue, but there's no way for me to contribute even human changes upstream because I'll be lost in the AI contributions so I don't bother.
So almost everything is forked and I then just have the agent keep my changes in sync with upstream. Works like a charm. I suspect my pattern is commonplace.
Yep, same here. I hate it a lot, but it's the new reality. It's easier/better for me to just fork, change whatever the hell I want, and push it to my fork. If I become away that upstream wants it I'm happy to put in the work to get a clean merge, but I'm not wasting anymore time pushing things upstream without some indicator that my time is valued by them. Been burned too many time now. It wasn't this way pre-AI, but AI peed in the pool and there isn't a good way to clean it yet
> If I become away that upstream wants it I'm happy to put in the work to get a clean merge, but I'm not wasting anymore time pushing things upstream without some indicator that my time is valued by them. Been burned too many time now.
Do you realize that all the major package system on BSD and Linux works that way. You take upstream, patch it to get it to compile on the system, and then build a package. That is what open source is about. It's not about building a community and what's not.
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.
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.
(edit: maybe put AI tokens on stablecoin rails as value tokens? could be fun, could move them around instantly between participants on the value rails and could consume them programmatically, if someone implements this idea, buy me a beer!)
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?
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).
That strikes me as a bad solution. I've sent plenty of PRs over the last two decades that were things I wasn't sure if upstream wanted or not, but I did the work and wanted to offer it to them. If you get penalized for not having a PR merged, it's going to incentivize selfishness
In any case, my proposal is a rough sketch of how I'd approach the problem, not a production ready algorithm. But I'd expect even that basic approach to work a lot better than github's approach.
This is a band-aid. Maybe even a good band-aid, because it'll keep individual contributors from flooring the zone. But the core problem is Github's model that assumes code is worth reading.
I'm much rather see the agent logs stapled to PRs. Make it easy to understand if there's a brain behind the suggested changes before engaging.
This is the fundamental problem. You have to look at the equilibrium. When you submit a PR, you're asking for some of my time. I have to figure out if it's likely to be worth it for me. If you have a track record of producing useful software that I have merged before, you're putting your reputation at risk when you submit a new PR, so it's probably good. If you start sending AI slop, I'm going to downgrade your reputation.
If you have no track record though, I'll probably at least take a glance since even if I'm not sure, at least you had to spend some time to write the code and put together the PR. Now that's not true.
My guess is we're going to have to create some new systems for reputation, maybe bond posting, maybe "sponsored" PRs, where someone trusted vouches for it, etc.
Incidentally, this doesn't just apply to PRs. It's emails, all kinds of other messages, reports, etc.
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.
So almost everything is forked and I then just have the agent keep my changes in sync with upstream. Works like a charm. I suspect my pattern is commonplace.
Do you realize that all the major package system on BSD and Linux works that way. You take upstream, patch it to get it to compile on the system, and then build a package. That is what open source is about. It's not about building a community and what's not.
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.
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)
(edit: maybe put AI tokens on stablecoin rails as value tokens? could be fun, could move them around instantly between participants on the value rails and could consume them programmatically, if someone implements this idea, buy me a beer!)
This sounds like a piece of worldbuilding from a Daniel Suarez novel. Who has tokens but no money?
"Donate tokens". "Gift tokens". Semantic drift?
It was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48621645
If there’s even any minor truth to dead internet theory then it extends to Github most certainly.