Thread

1. 0x69420 · 1789571110 · focus · HN ↗

   now imagine how many other devs and maintainers are contemplating this but just haven't been pushed to their personal breaking point yet. or take note of how many, when asked about the spam problem, just nervously go "yeah it's kinda rough haha...". or how many will vent about it on their twitter-like of choice with increasing frequency.

   remember hacktoberfest 2020? that's just all public-facing source 365 days a year now, except instead of "updated README.md" it's some vaguely-plausible fix... then you read the PR body and someone couldn't even be bothered to, or, just as likely couldn't explain it themselves. and that sort of sinking dread sets in.

   1. jwcooper · 1789571695 · focus · HN ↗

      I would guess we'll start seeing more open source projects with much tighter restrictions on who can participate. Closed contributions and heavily automated (or even closed) issue tracking is probably already happening and will spread faster.

      I entirely sympathize with these maintainers too. I've had 2 instances where an LLM has surfaced a bug and I just couldn't get myself to open a PR and dump more work onto these maintainers, even after manually writing one up (neither were critical bugs, it's fine).

      Seeing popular projects (like hermes) having 5k issues and 5k pull requests is madness.

      1. staminade · 1789572801 · focus · HN ↗

         On the other hand we'll probably see a lot more fully vibecoded projects gaining traction, because of the rate at which they can move once human design and review gets taken out of the equation.

         For example, I recently came across Hucre, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;productdevbook&#x2F;hucre" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;productdevbook&#x2F;hucre, which is a JS spreadsheet library apparently developed entirely in the past few months and which has already gained 2.2k GH stars.

         Is it any good? Who knows, but the alternatives for spreadsheet handling in JS aren&#x27;t great, either being limited, semi-commercial, or unmaintained. And creating a new one without LLM-assistance is a huge, painful, mostly thankless undertaking. It&#x27;s not surprising that a zero-dependency option that promises to do everything this can do would be popular.

         Everyone has had the experience of butting their head against functionality limitations of open-source libraries. Fully vibecoded libraries will be able to add functionality at a rate that human-authored ones can&#x27;t. Code quality might suffer, but if a library has a feature you need, and you&#x27;ve got a deadline to hit, are you going to avoid using it? Is the average developer? Or the average LLM?

         I think we&#x27;re about to hit an interesting period of human-only projects competing with vibecoded ones, and it&#x27;ll be an acid test as to whether the pro and anti claims about AI-coding bear out in terms of code reliably.

      2. user43928 · 1789572833 · focus · HN ↗

         Modern problems require modern solutions.

         Why not set up a triage bot with only read permissions on the project and restricted network access in order to triage issues?

         Perhaps this way one could turn the influx of spam into a source of useful information.

         1. jeremyjh · 1789573066 · focus · HN ↗

            These exist. Very elaborate systems in many cases. Otherwise Hermes would probably have 30,000. Like a lot of agent tools they merge a ton of slop though so I wouldn’t consider them leaders.

            1. Marsymars · 1789573841 · focus · HN ↗

               &gt; Otherwise Hermes would probably have 30,000.

               It already does!

               1. jeremyjh · 1789596047 · focus · HN ↗

                  I thought you must have meant open issues but no, they have 29K open PRs right now. 54,000 closed! Which is a heroic achievement.

                  I remember teknium stressing when he had 1500 open PRs.

            2. user43928 · 1789576948 · focus · HN ↗

               So, what is the problem then?

               Genuine question. Is having a prioritized list of reported issues still not useful in practice?

      3. Marsymars · 1789573769 · focus · HN ↗

         &gt; Seeing popular projects (like hermes) having 5k issues and 5k pull requests is madness.

         It&#x27;s actually got nearly 30k open pull requests!

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