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.