Someone made a 128k line PR to OpenCut

There is actually a really simple solution to this: auto reject PRs from people you dont know.

If someone is new to the project, ask them to write an issue explaining the bug/feature and how they plan to address/implement it. Make them demonstrate a human understanding of the code first.

This is not a purely technical problem but a social one too.

I actually checked the PR because I was curious if a cutting-edge AI can generate 128k lines of quality code. I mean, if that's true it's great!

Here is what I noticed while reading the PR:

- The PR has surpurisingly little meat. It contains 128k lines, but most of them are AI-generated documentation (86K lines, 68%). It also contains 9K lines of AI-generated tests (7%). So the actual code is just 32K lines (25%).

- For what it's worth mentioning, the documentation is bad. It mostly feels like a copy-and-paste from someone's LLM session. You can check it out yourself: https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/b883256/docs/iss...

- I have no deep understanding of OpenCut project, but the code seems buggy? I observe that it casually removes a few logics from the original code without any reason. So it's plausible that the PR is not only useless but harmful to merge.

So my takeaway is that a latest commercial LLM is not getting there, at least yet.

It’s got something for everyone.

1. Outrage is fun! 2. “This confirms my biases!” 3. It’s kind of a funny extreme of bad behavior we’ve all had to deal with

It's interesting and funny and indicative of a broader problem in open-source development, reaching not only technical projects but also stuff like Wikipedia. 90% of the reason I'm here is for the discussion, not literally for the links to news -- there's much better ways to curate news directly to my phone these days.

Plus, again: it's just downright funny. It starts funny b/c he's clearly well-meaning ("I do not think this can be directly merged into the project"), and then you get to the part where there's 300+ commits (20 of which are just "Updated project files") and you just can't help but crack a little smile!

It's novel spam? At least today it is, tomorrow probably not. 128k is impressive!

Because we need to celebrate BullShit at scale ! and celebrate the fearless data-scientists turned software engineers who aided by AI are setting PR records while we software engineers watch with envy and sarcasm.

My guess is they wanted to share some ideas; as in: what features could be added and what would an example implementation look like. They have no interest in deeper discussions or in forking the project.

To me a large PR with a disclaimer that it should not be merged seems a decent way of doing this and better than not sharing anything at all.

But I see how this could get distracting if more people do this. I assume this is a one time thing. In future I would recommend creating some fork with a note that it is not going to be maintained.

Low signal, high noise. Why waste time looking for the needle in the haystack?

I don't see any evidence that a maintainer has responded? It looks like all the responses are by

- Some bot the maintainers are using to do preliminary code review

- Trolls saying "lgtm" and the like.

I don’t think that’s the root cause here. The submitter decided that a 128k line PR was a good thing.

AI is a tool. The problem is software engineering best practices (small, reviewable, incremental self-contained PRs.)

He's still going. Just saw a new commit using Claude to add .vscode to .gitignore and untrack the files. How much did it just cost to do something that can be done in two cli commands.

I appreciate your point and your candor, however forking is not new tech. This 'etiquette' is not at all new.

> The attitude of "I will do only the fun part.

It would've been better if the PR author actually had any fun thing they wanted to do. They didn't, hence the PR title "Try to help but need some help." This PR literally has no purpose.

my experience as well - it would rather re-invent the wheel over and over

It was trained on the code the finest leet coders wrote. I do wish it would look at my existing code base and write more shit code like I write.

Looks like it's mostly tests and AI specs.

This isn't directed at you, but rather the general "A!", "No, A is no good. B!" thing that HN does. Lots of people swear by Claude Code on HN; nearly any post that could shoehorn an AI discussion has someone saying "But I just use Claude Code and it works fine!", with others saying that gemini is better if you pay, etc.

The issue is, very few actually publish the AI code. I have, at least three times on HN. I don't pay for AI - well, i put $10 on deepseek to check it out and have spent less than a penny. I mostly use local or copilot. I've never used chatgpt to write code, nor claude, gemini, grok, or meta.

So, the result is, this comes off as:

  "My football team is best because A,B,C!"
  "No, A & B aren't important, C,X,Y are, and my football team has those!"
  "So you agree C is important?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44652138 I used copilot to add static, and fix the digits spoken to singular digits instead of groups, "7, 3, 4" instead of "seven hundred and thirty four." Done with copilot.exe; final version without pops, clicks, and crash at: https://github.com/genewitch/opensource/blob/master/numbers-...

https://github.com/genewitch/opensource/blob/master/specific... and https://github.com/genewitch/opensource/blob/master/markov%3... to convert n-gate to json and then put the json into a markov chain. Done with copilot.exe

https://github.com/genewitch/aider2048clone A local 70b LLM model oneshot with Aider (a tool to write codebases with AI); oneshot means i typed a prompt and then published the output, i didn't edit or change anything or re-prompt.

and the oldest, and my favorite example so far; https://github.com/genewitch/emd A full react app stack - including the node.js 'server.js', done in copilot.exe over the course of ~20 hours. I didn't manually edit the code except for one tiny part where the only math in the code is, and i worked it out on a piece of paper with a pencil, then coded it in myself. i couldn't explain it well enough to copilot for it to produce the code i wanted. Luckily the nuts and bolts of jscript is easy enough, it's all the const and "{}" that i don't "get".

I've linked all of these on HN before, usually in protest to someone else not linking their code and/or complaining that no one links their code.

none of these were "thinking" mode.

Does anyone else feel like Coderabbit is mostly noise?

It's not bait, so it can't be "clickbait."

Nobody here is clicking out of a burning curiosity to resolve the PR-submitter's identity. We can reliably predict it'll be a random account that we've never seen before and will never recognize again.

Analogy: It's like someone linked "A kitten doing somersaults." I don't care which kitten is involved, I'll click because I anticipate cuteness and amusing acrobatics. Replacing it with "Miss Mittens (a kitten) doing somersaults" is unnecessary.

There is zero information gained by actually naming the person in the title. They are just a random contributor out of all the contributors on GitHub

Is their name particularly relevant to the headline? If anything it feels like it might be beneficial to emphasize that it's not about the who here, but instead the what.

What would you prefer? Naming someone that nobody knows?

Like anyone, it can always keep adding new code that “works”. The problem is that it’s causing other code not to work at the same time, and it doesn’t see that.

More important than code that works now is code that can be reviewed and maintained so it will continue to work in the future. AI-slop, even moderately-sized, might pass the test cases and seem to work, but it is doubtful it will continue to work in the future, particularly if a code base continues to accept more slop.

This PR has no purpose whatsoever that benefits the project. No open source maintainer should have to put up being spammed with 128k line AI slop made without any concrete purpose. It's mind blowing that AI zealots are now demanding people to be supportive of such spam with an air of moral superiority. Won't somebody please think of the spammers!

If someone wants that green Github contribution graph, they should at least take the time and effort to learn software engineering. They shouldn't steal open source maintainers' time with AI slop and expect them to clean it up. It's beyond offensive. It's telling the maintainers that is what their projects are worth.

The PR author seems clueless.

But, it's at least a little remarkable that the cluelessness was able to then pester someone in an unusual way.

Your coworkers did not push 128 klocs in one PR.

more like nuke it from orbit (its the only way to be sure)

If it's an isolated case and not anything more sophisticated, maybe. When people inevitably start mass-spamming open source projects to make their Github contribution graphs greener, this will be a serious problem that will accelerate maintainer burnouts.

This became a problem when free T-shirts were involved [1]. Now imagine what will happen when job prospects come into the picture.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894