> The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause.

FWIW, I have seen human developers do this countless times. In fact there are many people in engineering that will argue for these kinds of "fixes" by default. Usually it's in closed-source projects where the shittiness is hidden from the world, but trust me, it's common.

> I suspect their motivation was just to get a commit on their record. This is becoming a troubling trend with AI tools.

There was already a problem (pre-AI) with shitty PRs on GitHub made to try to game a system. Regardless of how they made the change, the underlying problem is a policy one: how to deal with people making shitty changes for ulterior motives. I expect the solution is actually more AI to detect shitty changes from suspicious submitters.

Another solution (that I know nobody's going to go for): stop using GitHub. Back in the "olden times", we just had CVS, mailing lists and patches. You had to perform some effort in order to get to the point of getting the change done and merged, and it was not necessarily obvious afterward that you had contributed. This would probably stop 99% of people who are hoping for a quick change to boost their profile.