>I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
Yes.
>but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't
This is very much in line with my comment about doing it to filter and dismiss. The author didn't say "So I can reach out and see if their clear eagerness to contribute extends to learning to code in more detail".