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> Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the code contributions, but also massively impact the other, non-tangible contributions like ideas, eyes on code, etc. That feels way worse.

These "contributions", while they did exist in small quantities, mostly were not actually what you've described there.

Instead, those boiled down to unsolicited opinions, hostile takeover attempts, value extraction, general drama and just overall overhead over simply building code.

This was not always the case, but the GitHub model of building FOSS (and removal of all friction) certainly made it the new default.

Said model was always unsustainable, but the burn rate made it sustainable enough so that we could just throw more humans at the problem to replace the burnt-out ones.

AI pushed the burn rate over the replacement rate.

=> We will likely see more projects adapt this or a similar stance I think.

It always seemed like a weird default to let people (esp strangers) submit PRs that weren't tied to an issue nor approved.

What do you mean you just spent a week implementing something in secret?

AI makes it extra silly because now you can craft up your unsolicited code change in minutes, making it extra obvious that code changes should spawn from real discussion and agreement.

TFA is part of looking for new processes that actually work. Dunno why people are having such rose tinted glasses about pull requests. Open an issue, talk to people. Have an idea? Then get people to cosign it.

I think it was different pre-AI. Someone might come in and spend days getting some understanding of the codebase before they contribute some minor fix. Over time they might stick around a make some more of these, progressively gaining trust so when they do take on something bigger the maintainers will know they aren't wasting their time reviewing it.

Now they can drop a multi thousand line poorly understood PR day 1.

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Good faith PRs were also suffering under the current model. Ive opened PRs by hand on small projects to try and fix personal issues that probably affected others. Then the PRs languish for months or in one case literal years under the deluge of ai slop being spammed at the repo. I’m not going to ping the maintainers constantly when I know they are struggling so I’m left running my fork and no one else gets the benefit.
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