> In addition, Williamson said that Giovannini (or his agent) had submitted patches that were incorrect and then "replied to objections with LLM-generated justifications that eventually overwhelmed the maintainer into merging the fix"
If someone really wants a feature in a project you wrote, but you don't care about the feature, just let them fork. Its fine.
Not getting paid anything, getting bullied and harassed while spending their free time maintaining things. Surely this isn't sustainable. And telling maintainers how to act will not fix anything.
That depends. In this case it's good actionable advice that should hopefully lower cognitive load. Politely suggest a fork, then if the nagging persists block and move on. Sure if you're in a position of authority you have a responsibility to the community but cutting ties with a stranger who is flagrantly violating social norms is perfectly acceptable. There's no expectation that you indefinitely burden yourself with their poor behavior.
Sometimes dropping the ban hammer really is in the best interests of both yourself and the project.
Relying on maintainers to always do the right thing to ensure our security by telling them what to do is not the way.
They're not useless. They just don't work on the individual level but on the collective. It's a numbers game …
The advice is actionable because it is a concrete change that could be made. I believe it to be relevant to the context because someone in a position of authority who is badgered into accepting something would most likely benefit from reevaluating how he is interacting with the general public.
A lot of people don't want to be responsible for that. It's not fun to carry that weight.
I'm just saying its ok to ignore overly enthusiastic contributors and tell them to just fork your project.
I think this does help, actually. In my early days of maintaining opensource software I felt burdened by open PRs - like I was letting someone down by ignoring their work. "Its ok, let them do whatever in their own fork" is advice I wish someone had given me.
Indeed. For too long, maintainers were expected to be gracious, courteous, and polite at all costs lest they be labeled "problematic", except for a few who were too influential to be muzzled like Theo de Raadt or Linus.
Perhaps we need to normalize bullying people who submit obvious slop as PRs.
I agree, and I never suggested we cannot do these things.
I'm saying we should normalize immediately telling people who submit obvious AI slop to fuck right off. Submitting AI slop pull requests is rude. It is disrespectful of the maintainer's time and energy. I see no reason why I or anyone else should be respectful of someone who has already demonstrated a lack of reciprocal respect by submitting a vibe-coded PR that they obviously haven't even read or tested.
Respect must be earned.
In fact, LLMs proliferate in exactly because people are gullible, greedy and lazy and it’s easier to write a prompt than do the hard work of architecting software. It is easier to vibe code than use them with care. It is easier to tell oneself ‘I will just accept this PR blindly, but I promise I will do a better job reviewing the next’
The only thing it does is filter good contributors out, while you still have to deal with the bad ones.
Can't have the one without the other! It's part of that same technology, and it's fair to conclude that LLMs are bad if you're upset enough at the results.
Because they don't want to be seen like assholes, who just blindly dismiss PRs, and because they take the technical discussion about the PR in good faith.
It can be quite hard to discern this behavior from a new contributor to the project that might be a domain expert on something you are not. Possibly with the exception of reacting far too quickly & enthusiastically compared to real people that might have a life.
If someone gets emotional about their PR being rejected, well... its kinda their issue.
Edit: I see this comment getting downvoted. To be clear, I was trying to explain why someone would want to merge a PR without going through all of it, I didn't mean to call such people stupid.