The discussion here is amusing to read, but this is obviously a submission to instant-reject. No need for waste your time reading the PR, and I’m sure the maintainer won’t.
This is like spam making the front page of HN. Why?
cloudbonsai · 4h ago
I actually checked the PR because I was curious if a cutting-edge AI can generate 128k lines of quality code. I mean, if that's true it's great!
Here is what I noticed while reading the PR:
- The PR has surpurisingly little meat. It contains 128k lines, but most of them are AI-generated documentation (86K lines, 68%). It also contains 9K lines of AI-generated tests (7%). So the actual code is just 32K lines (25%).
- I have no deep understanding of OpenCut project, but the code seems buggy? I observe that it casually removes a few logics from the original code without any reason. So it's plausible that the PR is not only useless but harmful to merge.
So my takeaway is that a latest commercial LLM is not getting there, at least yet.
brookst · 5h ago
It’s got something for everyone.
1. Outrage is fun!
2. “This confirms my biases!”
3. It’s kind of a funny extreme of bad behavior we’ve all had to deal with
bbor · 5h ago
It's interesting and funny and indicative of a broader problem in open-source development, reaching not only technical projects but also stuff like Wikipedia. 90% of the reason I'm here is for the discussion, not literally for the links to news -- there's much better ways to curate news directly to my phone these days.
Plus, again: it's just downright funny. It starts funny b/c he's clearly well-meaning ("I do not think this can be directly merged into the project"), and then you get to the part where there's 300+ commits (20 of which are just "Updated project files") and you just can't help but crack a little smile!
bwfan123 · 5h ago
Because we need to celebrate BullShit at scale ! and celebrate the fearless data-scientists turned software engineers who aided by AI are setting PR records while we software engineers watch with envy and sarcasm.
morkalork · 5h ago
It's novel spam? At least today it is, tomorrow probably not. 128k is impressive!
soraminazuki · 2h ago
This shouldn't be flagged. This is a new type of spam that will have serious consequences for open source.
LLMs have made it possible to effortlessly produce plausible looking garbage at scale and open source maintainers will soon have to deal with a high volume of these PRs going forward.
Just look at how much spammers it attracted when Digital Ocean offered free T-shirts to open source contributors [1]. Now, imagine what will happen when job prospects are involved and anyone can mass produce plausible looking garbage PRs in one single click.
LLMs will accelerate maintainer burnouts in the open source world and there's no good solution for that right now.
We'll at least it's easy to find the root cause of the problem :/
tyre · 6h ago
I don’t think that’s the root cause here. The submitter decided that a 128k line PR was a good thing.
AI is a tool. The problem is software engineering best practices (small, reviewable, incremental self-contained PRs.)
hsbauauvhabzb · 6h ago
The problem is I can automatically ban tabs if I don’t like them. I Can limit the number of characters per line with a script. I cannot prevent you from sending prs with AI slop, nor can I easily detect it
cr125rider · 5h ago
Ah if you can’t easily detect it, wouldn’t that mean it passes muster?
p1necone · 5h ago
Human beings make relatively predictable mistakes, to the extent that I can skim read large PRs with mental heuristics and work out whether the dev thought carefully about the problem when designing a solution, and whether they hit common pitfalls etc.
AI code generation tends to pass a bunch of those heuristics while generating code that you can only identify as nonsense by completely understanding it, which takes a lot more time and effort. It can generate sensible variable and function names, concise functions, relatively decent documentation etc while misunderstanding the problem space in subtle ways that human beings very rarely do.
shadowgovt · 5h ago
Sounds like it raises the bar on verification requirements.
... In a world where someone almost compromised SSL via a detail-missed trust attack... Maybe that's okay?
handsclean · 5h ago
No. They’re not hard to detect because they’re good, they’re “hard” to detect because understanding code takes time, and you’re putting that work on the maintainer.
I find it hard to believe that people who don’t intuit this have ever been on the receiving end. If I fill up your email inbox with LLM slop, would you consider that I’ve done you a favor because some of it’s helpful? Or would you care more about the time you’re wasting on the rest, and that it’d take longer to find the good bits than to make them yourself, and just block me?
112233 · 45m ago
That's like saying if you could not tell the person calling you was a scammer and lost money, then the call passes muster.
As long as the person submitting PR has put in the effort to ensure it is of high quality, it should not matter what tool they used, right?
Well, overwhelming majority vibies seem not to. Welcome to "block all chinese and russian IPs" era, open source AI edition.
Aeolun · 5h ago
You can make a bot that auto rejects everything over 5k lines though
Ancalagon · 6h ago
How much do we think was spent on claude code for this?
Arrowmaster · 4h ago
He's still going. Just saw a new commit using Claude to add .vscode to .gitignore and untrack the files. How much did it just cost to do something that can be done in two cli commands.
cadamsdotcom · 6h ago
This is a fork.
We are going to have to learn some new etiquette with this new tech, but that’s always how it’s been.
dgfitz · 5h ago
I appreciate your point and your candor, however forking is not new tech. This 'etiquette' is not at all new.
bee_rider · 5h ago
I wonder, based on the start of the thread:
> I do not think this can be directly merged into the project. I think it requires some manual reviewing if something (I mean some part of code) is useful for the project development.
It seems like maybe his idea was to make a bunch of code, and then see if the maintainers want to pluck anything out of it. This is, of course, not how things are done and not very helpful. Projects don’t need a bunch of AI generated brainstorming. But, I guess, at least it seems well-intentioned? Over-enthusiastic.
thih9 · 5h ago
My guess is they wanted to share some ideas; as in: what features could be added and what would an example implementation look like. They have no interest in deeper discussions or in forking the project.
To me a large PR with a disclaimer that it should not be merged seems a decent way of doing this and better than not sharing anything at all.
But I see how this could get distracting if more people do this. I assume this is a one time thing. In future I would recommend creating some fork with a note that it is not going to be maintained.
bee_rider · 4h ago
It just seems overwhelming and, therefore, very unlikely to get any traction. But I guess we’ll see.
em3rgent0rdr · 4h ago
Better if the submitter opened a feature request clearly describing the feature. As part of such a request, they could provide some screenshots and maybe a link to their AI-slop generated code for anyone curious to demo as a proof-of-concept, but without burdening any human with having to look at the slop.
delecti · 5h ago
The fact that this wasn't immediately rejected with a stern "GTFO" tells me the project maintainers have way more patience than me.
gpm · 5h ago
I don't see any evidence that a maintainer has responded? It looks like all the responses are by
- Some bot the maintainers are using to do preliminary code review
- Trolls saying "lgtm" and the like.
a2128 · 5h ago
I had a pull request like this on my project somewhat recently, thousands of files changed, the author seemed unsure of what exactly they added, and names suggested use of AI tools.
I think it's a cool use case for AI, for non-programmers to be able to customize open source software for themselves with AI tools (just hope it doesn't introduce a data loss bug or security vulnerability...) But obviously these tools as of today will make an absolute mess over time without a lot of guidance, and being a non-programmer makes it impossible to give it that guidance. I guess it's fine if the only user is the non-programmer and they're never gonna maintain it themselves, but sometimes they assume some of the code somewhere will somehow be useful for the project and so they open a pull request like this without realizing the insanity they're doing
maxbond · 5h ago
I don't think we should be dunking on someone for saying, "I have no idea what I'm doing and I need help." This isn't hubris. They didn't think that this 100k line change would be accepted. They were just asking for guidance.
I don't think this belongs on HN.
mat_b · 4h ago
The attitude of "I will do only the fun part. I'll create some barely workable code and expect others to fix it" existed long before AI code generation. Vibe coding is really enabling it to be taken to another level.
soraminazuki · 3h ago
> The attitude of "I will do only the fun part.
It would've been better if the PR author actually had any fun thing they wanted to do. They didn't, hence the PR title "Try to help but need some help." This PR literally has no purpose.
mgerdts · 5h ago
Coderabbit’s estimate of review time is interesting:
Estimated code review effort
5 (Critical) | ~90 minutes
cadamsdotcom · 6h ago
Also can we get rid of “Someone” in the headline?
It’s very clickbaity as the identity of the “Someone” is one of the first things you see by clicking the link.
Larrikin · 6h ago
There is zero information gained by actually naming the person in the title. They are just a random contributor out of all the contributors on GitHub
Terr_ · 5h ago
It's not bait, so it can't be "clickbait."
Nobody here is clicking out of a burning curiosity to resolve the PR-submitter's identity. We can reliably predict it'll be a random account that we've never seen before and will never recognize again.
Analogy: It's like someone linked "A kitten doing somersaults." I don't care which kitten is involved, I'll click because I anticipate cuteness and amusing acrobatics. Replacing it with "Miss Mittens (a kitten) doing somersaults" is unnecessary.
kevingadd · 6h ago
Is their name particularly relevant to the headline? If anything it feels like it might be beneficial to emphasize that it's not about the who here, but instead the what.
ranger_danger · 6h ago
What would you prefer? Naming someone that nobody knows?
RGBCube · 6h ago
Holy slop.
This does reflect my experience with Claude Code too. It just writes TOO MUCH damn code. It's never able to understand the tiny change that would make the software actually be better without guidance, and at that point I'd rather write it myself.
It's fine for gruntwork though.
Ancalagon · 6h ago
my experience as well - it would rather re-invent the wheel over and over
tough · 6h ago
their owners charge per token so...
kirb · 5h ago
On the Pro tier, it’s a fixed monthly price with fixed quota per 5 hour window.
That said, every time I’ve tried it, it’s spent ages writing code that barely works, where it keeps writing over-engineered workarounds to obvious errors. Eventually, it gives up and decides broken is good enough, and returns to the prompt. So you still have a point…
koakuma-chan · 6h ago
Looks like it's mostly tests and AI specs.
azemetre · 5h ago
It all amounts to chargeable tokens in the end.
koakuma-chan · 5h ago
Anthropic offers a flat fee subscription.
brookst · 5h ago
Conspiracy theories need to at least have a passing compatibility with reality. Anthropic loses money with more tokens used to solve the same problem.
5pl1n73r · 5h ago
That begs the question: how big of a codebase can these tools generate that works?
(loop unrolling doesn't count)
em3rgent0rdr · 4h ago
More important than code that works now is code that can be reviewed and maintained so it will continue to work in the future. AI-slop, even moderately-sized, might pass the test cases and seem to work, but it is doubtful it will continue to work in the future, particularly if a code base continues to accept more slop.
pengaru · 4h ago
I always looked forward to the day spammers would invade my free software projects with mountains of generated "contributions"
dollylambda · 6h ago
The title on this PR "Try to help but need some help" LMAO
andrewmcwatters · 6h ago
This is egregious, but I’ve straight up had coworkers pull this sort of clown work in actual workplaces.
relaxing · 5h ago
Your coworkers did not push 128 klocs in one PR.
No comments yet
bwfan123 · 5h ago
wow, BS at scale. Love the LGTMs and the ship its. A few of these merged PRs and the project gets into the shitter.
meta/amazon manager be like - productivity through the roof.
stephenlf · 6h ago
Initial reaction—haven’t read through the code yet, but I expect to see 100% AI slop. Also, I love the comments saying LGTM
———
Quickly glancing through the code. 20 commits with the message, “Update documentation and project organization.”
cocodill · 6h ago
kill it with fire before it lays eggs
andrekandre · 5h ago
more like nuke it from orbit (its the only way to be sure)
shadowgovt · 5h ago
I mean... At the end of the day, this is easy to handle.
Reject: please break into digestible features, probably no more than 1500 lines each. Our team is responsible for hand-verifying all changes and this cannot be hand-verified practically.
... And if they disagree they can fork.
soraminazuki · 2h ago
If it's an isolated case and not anything more sophisticated, maybe. When people inevitably start mass-spamming open source projects to make their Github contribution graphs greener, this will be a serious problem that will accelerate maintainer burnouts.
This became a problem when free T-shirts were involved [1]. Now imagine what will happen when job prospects come into the picture.
> When people inevitably start mass-spamming open source projects to make their Github contribution graphs greener
How does GitHub handle that right now? What's to stop an individual account from just dropping line-noise PRs onto projects (i.e. random-bytestring files that couldn't possibly be correct)?
Seems like whatever the social network (and, to be clear, GitHub is a social network) uses to police trolls right now could be applied to AI-spam. This is a problem every social network has to solve eventually; surely GitHub hasn't gone this long with no solution at all?
This is like spam making the front page of HN. Why?
Here is what I noticed while reading the PR:
- The PR has surpurisingly little meat. It contains 128k lines, but most of them are AI-generated documentation (86K lines, 68%). It also contains 9K lines of AI-generated tests (7%). So the actual code is just 32K lines (25%).
- For what it's worth mentioning, the documentation is bad. It mostly feels like a copy-and-paste from someone's LLM session. You can check it out yourself: https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/b883256/docs/iss...
- I have no deep understanding of OpenCut project, but the code seems buggy? I observe that it casually removes a few logics from the original code without any reason. So it's plausible that the PR is not only useless but harmful to merge.
So my takeaway is that a latest commercial LLM is not getting there, at least yet.
1. Outrage is fun! 2. “This confirms my biases!” 3. It’s kind of a funny extreme of bad behavior we’ve all had to deal with
Plus, again: it's just downright funny. It starts funny b/c he's clearly well-meaning ("I do not think this can be directly merged into the project"), and then you get to the part where there's 300+ commits (20 of which are just "Updated project files") and you just can't help but crack a little smile!
LLMs have made it possible to effortlessly produce plausible looking garbage at scale and open source maintainers will soon have to deal with a high volume of these PRs going forward.
Just look at how much spammers it attracted when Digital Ocean offered free T-shirts to open source contributors [1]. Now, imagine what will happen when job prospects are involved and anyone can mass produce plausible looking garbage PRs in one single click.
LLMs will accelerate maintainer burnouts in the open source world and there's no good solution for that right now.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
We'll at least it's easy to find the root cause of the problem :/
AI is a tool. The problem is software engineering best practices (small, reviewable, incremental self-contained PRs.)
AI code generation tends to pass a bunch of those heuristics while generating code that you can only identify as nonsense by completely understanding it, which takes a lot more time and effort. It can generate sensible variable and function names, concise functions, relatively decent documentation etc while misunderstanding the problem space in subtle ways that human beings very rarely do.
... In a world where someone almost compromised SSL via a detail-missed trust attack... Maybe that's okay?
I find it hard to believe that people who don’t intuit this have ever been on the receiving end. If I fill up your email inbox with LLM slop, would you consider that I’ve done you a favor because some of it’s helpful? Or would you care more about the time you’re wasting on the rest, and that it’d take longer to find the good bits than to make them yourself, and just block me?
As long as the person submitting PR has put in the effort to ensure it is of high quality, it should not matter what tool they used, right?
Well, overwhelming majority vibies seem not to. Welcome to "block all chinese and russian IPs" era, open source AI edition.
We are going to have to learn some new etiquette with this new tech, but that’s always how it’s been.
> I do not think this can be directly merged into the project. I think it requires some manual reviewing if something (I mean some part of code) is useful for the project development.
It seems like maybe his idea was to make a bunch of code, and then see if the maintainers want to pluck anything out of it. This is, of course, not how things are done and not very helpful. Projects don’t need a bunch of AI generated brainstorming. But, I guess, at least it seems well-intentioned? Over-enthusiastic.
To me a large PR with a disclaimer that it should not be merged seems a decent way of doing this and better than not sharing anything at all.
But I see how this could get distracting if more people do this. I assume this is a one time thing. In future I would recommend creating some fork with a note that it is not going to be maintained.
- Some bot the maintainers are using to do preliminary code review
- Trolls saying "lgtm" and the like.
I think it's a cool use case for AI, for non-programmers to be able to customize open source software for themselves with AI tools (just hope it doesn't introduce a data loss bug or security vulnerability...) But obviously these tools as of today will make an absolute mess over time without a lot of guidance, and being a non-programmer makes it impossible to give it that guidance. I guess it's fine if the only user is the non-programmer and they're never gonna maintain it themselves, but sometimes they assume some of the code somewhere will somehow be useful for the project and so they open a pull request like this without realizing the insanity they're doing
I don't think this belongs on HN.
It would've been better if the PR author actually had any fun thing they wanted to do. They didn't, hence the PR title "Try to help but need some help." This PR literally has no purpose.
Estimated code review effort
5 (Critical) | ~90 minutes
It’s very clickbaity as the identity of the “Someone” is one of the first things you see by clicking the link.
Nobody here is clicking out of a burning curiosity to resolve the PR-submitter's identity. We can reliably predict it'll be a random account that we've never seen before and will never recognize again.
Analogy: It's like someone linked "A kitten doing somersaults." I don't care which kitten is involved, I'll click because I anticipate cuteness and amusing acrobatics. Replacing it with "Miss Mittens (a kitten) doing somersaults" is unnecessary.
This does reflect my experience with Claude Code too. It just writes TOO MUCH damn code. It's never able to understand the tiny change that would make the software actually be better without guidance, and at that point I'd rather write it myself.
It's fine for gruntwork though.
That said, every time I’ve tried it, it’s spent ages writing code that barely works, where it keeps writing over-engineered workarounds to obvious errors. Eventually, it gives up and decides broken is good enough, and returns to the prompt. So you still have a point…
(loop unrolling doesn't count)
No comments yet
meta/amazon manager be like - productivity through the roof.
———
Quickly glancing through the code. 20 commits with the message, “Update documentation and project organization.”
Reject: please break into digestible features, probably no more than 1500 lines each. Our team is responsible for hand-verifying all changes and this cannot be hand-verified practically.
... And if they disagree they can fork.
This became a problem when free T-shirts were involved [1]. Now imagine what will happen when job prospects come into the picture.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894
How does GitHub handle that right now? What's to stop an individual account from just dropping line-noise PRs onto projects (i.e. random-bytestring files that couldn't possibly be correct)?
Seems like whatever the social network (and, to be clear, GitHub is a social network) uses to police trolls right now could be applied to AI-spam. This is a problem every social network has to solve eventually; surely GitHub hasn't gone this long with no solution at all?