zlacker

To play devil’s advocate: We’ve vendored a few open source projects by just asking an LLM to fix obvious bugs that have been open for 12+ months (some projects are abandoned, others active).

If upstream can’t be bothered to fix such stuff (we’re talking major functionality gaps that a $10-100/month LLM can one-shot), isn’t my extremely well tested fix (typically a few dozen or maybe hundred lines) something they should accept?

The alternative is getting hard forked by an LLM, and having the fork evolve faster / better than upstream.

Telling people like me to f—— off is just going to accelerate irrelevance in situations like this.

>>hedora+(OP)
I agree with you, but I don't envy the maintainers. The problem is that it's really hard to tell if someone is skilled like you or just shoveling what an LLM wrote up to the maintainers to have them "figure it out." Honestly, getting a library hard forked and maintained by people that can keep up with the incoming PRs would be a relief to a lot of folks...

>>TheTay+i
Oh, to be clear, there’s no way we’d want incoming code for these forks.

Incoming bug reports or design docs an LLM could implement? Sure.

Maybe something like the Linux approach (tree of well-tested, thematic branches from lieutenants) would work better. We’d be happy to be lieutenants that shepherded our forks back to upstream.

>>hedora+(OP)
> Telling people like me to f—— off is just going to accelerate irrelevance in situations like this.

You have your fork and the fixes, the PR is just kindness on your part. If they don’t want it then just move on with your fork.

I once submitted a PR to some Salesforce helper SDK and the maintainer went on and on about approaches and refactoring etc. I just told him to take it or leave it, I don’t really care. I have my fork and fix already. They eventually merged it but I mean I didn’t care either way, I was just doing something nice for them.

>>hedora+(OP)
Open source projects are under no obligation to accept any patches, AI or human generated. Being the fastest evolving fork may not be their goal.

I'm pretty doubtful a handful of one-shot AI patches is a viable fork. Bug fixes are only one part of the workload.