Open source maintainers aren’t here to teach contributors how to write better code, we’re here for maintenance of the project. The review prevents shit getting merged. Humans write shit too. This is what reviews are for
That is just mostly wrong. Around 90% of the time, when you do a review, just fixing the issue that you found is much faster than explaining the issue and saying what needs to be done instead.
Reviews plainly are for educating the contributor to what constitutes “non-shit”(using your terminology) code on the repo. If that wasn’t the case, you could just not do a review and just change the code, without any interaction at all. Why would you communicate the change that needs to be done otherwise?
Rarely of course, something is so complicated that it actually takes more time to come up with the right code than do a review. But that is only a rare thing.
I don’t need to explain the issue, that’s what the issue report does
I’m sure every project is a little different. The one I maintain has well over 1000 merged PRs now (2000 if you count the old repo), and I’d be dead if I did even 1/4 of the work contributors do
Plus, even maintainers must have a code review and functional testing on their PRs, so doing the work yourself doesn’t relieve the human workload that must be done. It actually increases total maintainer effort to do the work yourself
I’m not talking about the work contributors do, obviously that is invaluable.
But if you do a review, and you see that a function should be extracted at one point to avoid code duplication, is it really faster to tell the contributor that a function needs to be extracted there, compared to just extracting it yourself as you see it?
The value of a review is collaborative truth finding and learning. If there is an LLM on the other end, that’s just not happening.
Part of being a maintainer is helping to onboard new contributors, this is why many projects have a tag for “good first issue”. Teaching people how to use the library/tool is part of that.
Yeah, the Turing test has essentially been solved and at least in a digital format aka text, audio, video call it is now quite difficult to fully determine if what you are getting is from a human or a machine. I think it won’t be long now until there’s a push for a biometric verification for the web and the internet is essentially split into agents only, agents and humans, and humans only.
I have some friends that are thinking of investing into some HiLow systems and making our own intranet. Or a meshnet. Seems like a fun project.
And no random bot scans, no agencies, no nothing but our own sites.
I mean might have to go back to old school with this type of repo, before internet repos were around, have to request for access to the code and confirm you cannot use AI to help you in any way before getting it
Then don’t be prejudice and invent worries about how the code was generated. We have prs for a reason.
