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.
This PR has no purpose whatsoever that benefits the project. No open source maintainer should have to put up being spammed with 128k line AI slop made without any concrete purpose. It's mind blowing that AI zealots are now demanding people to be supportive of such spam with an air of moral superiority. Won't somebody please think of the spammers!
If someone wants that green Github contribution graph, they should at least take the time and effort to learn software engineering. They shouldn't steal open source maintainers' time with AI slop and expect them to clean it up. It's beyond offensive. It's telling the maintainers that is what their projects are worth.
To me they look like someone earnestly asking for help, but in the wrong forum. Closing the PR would make sense to me, but I don't think there's any purpose to making this person a main character. I've spent a lot of time in online programming communities, so people asking for help in awkward ways, perhaps inappropriately or with an element of entitlement, that's just Tuesday from my perspective.
I'm not an AI zealot, as it happens. I've made a lot of comments on here critical of AI. I just don't think HN is a place to gawk at random people's faux pas of GitHub etiquette.
My bad for assuming that you were an AI zealot. But I do want to stress that this issue isn't just about a single person. It's much bigger than that.
As I mentioned in my other comments, there were an influx of spammers directed at open source projects when Digital Ocean offered free T-shirts for open source contributions. With LLMs being able to mass-produce plausible looking garbage PRs, spammers looking for job prospects will flood the open source community, burning out maintainers in the process.
This issue needs to be discussed for the survival of open source.
> My bad for assuming that you were an AI zealot.
Thank you for the acknowledgement, that's rarer than it should be and I appreciate it.
I'm sure there's an issue with low quality PRs to open source projects, and that LLMs are making it worse, but I think the Twitter style of discourse where we identify some random person who said something ill advised and lay into them is just scapegoating. I don't think it's going to help open source maintainers deal with bad PRs or help prospective contributors understand how to make a PR (or when not to make one).
The PR author seems clueless.
But, it's at least a little remarkable that the cluelessness was able to then pester someone in an unusual way.