Technology

We now get a little digital idiot popping up in every program and OS saying it can help. It’s like Clippy but annoying.

Open source wasn’t ever perfect, but whatever cracks in there were are being blown a mile wide by these goddamn slop factories.

This is the perpetual issue, not just with AI: Any system will have flaws and weaknesses, but often, they can generally be papered over with some good will and patience...

Until selfish, immoral assholes come and ruin it for everyone.

From teenagers using the playground to smoke and bury their cigs in the sand, so now parents with small children can't use it any more, over companies exploiting legal loopholes to AI slop drowning volunteers in obnoxious bullshit: Most individual people might be decent, but a single turd is all it takes to ruin the punch bowl.

Unfortunately it's a general theme in Open Source. I lost almost all motivation for programming in my free-time because of all these AI-slop(-PRs). It's kinda sad, how that Art (among others) is flooded with slop...

Then get ready for people just making slop libraries, not because people are dissatisfied with existing solutions (such as I did with iota, which is a direct media layer similar to SDL, but has better access to some low-level functionality + OOP-ish + memory safe lang), but just because they can.

I got a link to a popular rectpacking algorithm pretty quickly after asking in a Discord server. Nowadays I'd be asked to "vibecode it".

Nowadays people use OpenClaw agents which don't really involve human input beyond the initial "fix this bug" prompt. They independently write the code, submit the PR, argue in the comments, and might even write a hit piece on you for refusing to merge their code.

I'd worry I've made a silly mistake which would make me look a fool and waste their time.

AI bros have zero self awareness and shame, which is why I continue to encourage that the best tool for fighting against it is making it socially shameful.

Somebody comes along saying "Oh look at the image is just genera..." and you cut them with "looks like absolute garbage right? Yeah, I know, AI always sucks, imagine seriously enjoying that hahah, so anyway, what were you saying?"

From what I have seen Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. seem to be running bots that are going around and submitting updates to open source repos with little to no human input.

LLM code generation is the ultimate dunning Kruger enhancer. They think they're 10x ninja wizards because they can generate unmaintainable demos.

Do they think the AI written code Just Works

yes.

literally yes.

It's insane

It is my understanding that pull requests say "Hey, I forked and modified your project. Look at it and consider adopting my changes in your project." So anyone who wants to look at the "experimental stuff" can just pull that fork. Someone in charge of the main branch decides if and when to merge pull requests.

The problem becomes the volume of requests; they're kinda getting DDOS'd.

Most projects don't have enough people or external interest for that kind of process.

It would be possible to establish some tooling like that, but standard forges don't provide that. So it'd feel cumbersome.

And in the end you're back at having contributors, trustworthiness, and quality control. Because testing and reviewing are contributions too. You don't want just a popularity contest (I want this) nor blindly trust unknown contribute.

There are automated checks which can help enforce correctness of the parts of the code that are being checked. For example, we could imagine a check that says "when I add a sprite to the list of assets, then the list of assets becomes one item longer than it was before". And if I wrote code that had a bug here, the automated check would catch it and show the problem without any humans needing to take the time.

But since code can do whatever you write it to do, there's always human review needed. If I wrote code so that adding a sprite also sent a single message to my enemy's Minecraft server then it's not going to fail any tests or show up anywhere, but we need humans to look at the code and see that I'm trying to turn other developers into a DDoS engine.

As others replied, you could choose to find and run someone's branch. This actually does happen with open-source projects: the original author disappears or abandons the project, other people want changes, and someone says "hey I have a copy of the project but with all those changes you want" and we all end up using that fork instead.

But as a tool for evaluating code that'll get merged, it does not work. Imagine you want to check out the new bleeding-edge version of Godot. There's currently ~4700 possible bleeding-edge versions, so which one will you use? You can't do this organically.

Most big projects do have something like beta releases. The humans decide what code changes to merge and they do all that and produce a new godot-beta. The people who want to test out the latest stuff use that and report problems which get fixed before they finally release the finished version to the public. But they could never just merge in random crap and then see if it was a good idea afterward.

Many do have automated checking, testing, rules for the PR maker to follow and such.

If they don’t have it set up, and the project is big, TBH the maintainers should set it up.

The issue is that these submitters are (often) drive-by spammers. They aren’t honest, they don’t care about the project, they just want quick kudos for a GitHub PR on a major project.

Filtering a sea of scammers is a whole different ballgame than guiding earnest, interested contributors. Automated tooling isn’t set up for that because (outside the occasional attempt to sneak malware into code) it wasn’t really a thing.

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pulls

Is what you're referring to but even if you have dedicated testers that's still people who have to go through the influx of pulls.

Then there's preference changes as well.

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/116434/commits/6a2fc8561da8fcf168cea3aff5a8cba77266b026

Even if there's nothing wrong with this one for instance. Someone will like "get rid of hard-coded" where as I would oppose this change because it makes it harder to read.

So you still need core team to look over it. If ai gives you 1000 of these in different areas it's wasting time. While people can read about standards, ai doesn't rather it just does what it's told.

there is?