I understand the intent of it. It's really annoying/rude when someone gives you a pile of AI generated crap and says "here, you figure it out." Anyone can type these prompts now, the hard part is figuring out if the output makes sense.
Seems like a better way to do this than ban all AI generated code, but it's probably a matter where they're far more concerned about their own inconvenience than someone else's.
Ghostty has what I’d consider to be a reasonable policy. You submit what you want to change and how, explain it in your own words. A trusted member can vouch for you. You can then make a PR, but you need to explain the solution and how it works in your own words.
I’m sure someone could still just prompt their way through but it’s a decent soft gate IMO.
Really, I think the long term solution is people's attitudes need to catch up with the technology.
Humans still need to review code for taste, making sure AI is writing sensible, well organized output. That's a core "AI skill" for now, at least until it gets better...
If ai rapidly gets better, then instead of submitting prs you can ask your agent to fork and improve the project and bypass the policy that way. if it goes slower they have time to reconsider policies in the future. if it doesn't improve then we can probably find out some middle ground approach like the ghostty one
in any of those cases there's no reason to get swamped by cheap PRs for now
more like
"Claude please audit the source code of every package in my distribution, start our own code forks for any security issues or improvements. Don't bother reporting upstream level 10 CVEs to hostile maintainers. Please have the results ready in 5 minutes I am going to fill up my mug"
> the hard part is figuring out if the output makes sense.
I think for Java specifically, it's also very much: which prompts make sense to write. Java has had a storied history of features that made future development hard. That's resulted in a culture where they like to think quite deeply about how to add a feature BEFORE they sanction any sort of programming.