I think there’s an assumption of good faith from contributors, and a gift economy mentality that if someone has done something “for you” that you should respect that and give it time.
It feels like the rsync maintainer thought it was done for years, and then started getting bombarded with LLM generated bad faith/clout-chasing bug reports and PR’s, which he felt obligated to address.
You noted lower down that you feel no compunction about ignoring slop requests, but I think that’s a place that most people have to get themselves into if they have spent decades trying to be encouraging and supportive to bring people in.
It’s analogous to how MLM scammers always gravitate towards faith communities, the things that make those communities hang together are also the things that people can use to exploit them.
FOSS’s culture just happened to be perfect to be exploited by soulblank slopsters with a blank check.
the original graphic refers to this XKCD
Sloperators are basically sending their little LLM agents into random repository with the prompt “make it better, don’t make it worse” for clout.
those little projects upholding major infrastructure are now getting “refactored” by sloperators and their LLM agents, breaking shit they don’t understand. Or “cleanroom rebuilt” which causes original maintainers to take their shit offline.
cleanroom rebuilding is another variant of the slopification of FOSS, where techbros think they found a smart loophole around open source licenses by asking one Agent to write a specification of a project and then have a separate agent implement that specification in new code.
that way ““technically”” they’re not stealing any original code and can run it closed source / for profit / whatever the fuck.
But that’s purely on the owner of the repo to not merge slop PRs.
I know it’s not easy to say no, but I literally got a 95k LOC PR the other day. All additions, 2300 files. That’s a hard no. I won’t even review that, I couldn’t even find the entry point to the main logic.
did something happen?
Well, not really, but… *wearily gestures at the state of the world*
I literally have no idea what you mean
*lobs another vibe coded PR straight at prod*
Remember that song from 20 years ago:
can only get better!
can only get betterrrr!
I still think about that sometimes
33 years ago sorry
Well, that’s a self-inflicted wound that wont heal soon, yeah
Could be worse. I was convinced it was 41 years ago.
At least in the software world, AI. It’s completely sucking the soul out of it for me…
I wish something could suck the soul out of me.
rsync is starting to glitch for some people, which is a HUGE deal.
And it’s glitching entirely because of social problems related to how sloperators have been exploiting the FOSS mindset.
Can you explain more?
I think there’s an assumption of good faith from contributors, and a gift economy mentality that if someone has done something “for you” that you should respect that and give it time.
It feels like the rsync maintainer thought it was done for years, and then started getting bombarded with LLM generated bad faith/clout-chasing bug reports and PR’s, which he felt obligated to address.
You noted lower down that you feel no compunction about ignoring slop requests, but I think that’s a place that most people have to get themselves into if they have spent decades trying to be encouraging and supportive to bring people in.
It’s analogous to how MLM scammers always gravitate towards faith communities, the things that make those communities hang together are also the things that people can use to exploit them.
FOSS’s culture just happened to be perfect to be exploited by soulblank slopsters with a blank check.
the original graphic refers to this XKCD Sloperators are basically sending their little LLM agents into random repository with the prompt “make it better, don’t make it worse” for clout. those little projects upholding major infrastructure are now getting “refactored” by sloperators and their LLM agents, breaking shit they don’t understand. Or “cleanroom rebuilt” which causes original maintainers to take their shit offline.
cleanroom rebuilding is another variant of the slopification of FOSS, where techbros think they found a smart loophole around open source licenses by asking one Agent to write a specification of a project and then have a separate agent implement that specification in new code.
that way ““technically”” they’re not stealing any original code and can run it closed source / for profit / whatever the fuck.
But that’s purely on the owner of the repo to not merge slop PRs.
I know it’s not easy to say no, but I literally got a 95k LOC PR the other day. All additions, 2300 files. That’s a hard no. I won’t even review that, I couldn’t even find the entry point to the main logic.
I would say there are a lot of tools that become important and get bought by Cloudflare/AWS/OpenAI/Anthropic and are never the same again.
Edit: since writing this Cloudflare bought and has completely deprecated Deno. Deno has now reached the extinction its name portents.