Sounds futuristic. Maybe it's an NFT on an agentic blockchain for deep-sea solar farm mining?
Every model seemingly falls flat in this scope of programming. The PS3 is very complex and the tooling is fairly undocumented in a lot of instances. It doesn't surprise me most of these AI PR's are nonsense.
If anyone else has attempted writing PS3 homebrew apps using AI and has refined their tooling/systems/automation please let me know how you got the agents to work for you (:
In a complex codebase it’s funny how often they’ll come back with gigantic commits that just make everything worse or accomplish the goal but have 1000 lines of unnecessary complexity.
Every time they present it with a confident summary. I can see how a junior or just lazy dev would think this is their ticket to becoming a contributor to a repo with some big thing to put on their resume.
Or maybe it's worse because a lot of them aren't in bad faith they are well meaning people who just don't know or understand enough to realize they aren't being helpful.
There’s no need to test the PR when you already asked the AI to not make any mistakes.
A) tests need to pass
B) anything you write needs tests
C) the code quality must adhere to these standards
etc.etc.... Helping the LLMs that people Vibe code with, produce better quality results.
By not having these in place, it means people who want to help out, cant. because htey dont understand whats going on.
adding stuff to these files, woudl allow developers to give guidelines / guardrails for developement using these agents.
Should the barrier of entry be someone who knows how to code? or should the barrier of entry be someone who is motivated to help with open-source software.
Probably yes? QED submitting slop PRs is not helping. If "helping" is sticking it through an LLM, the developers can do that themselves with better insight and guidance? If you must help via an LLM, donate cash for tokens.
If you can't code, and cant donate cash/machine time, help by confirming issue reproductions, design, wikis, documentation, whatever.
The article unfortunately feels more like a rant than a good exploration of the problem space.
The people who can realistically submit a Linux patch that will ever get looked at is already a super select group through who-you-know network effects.
You can't apply the same system to random open source projects, the best option for people that run random small to medium sized open source projects is just to ban all unsolicited PRs, otherwise you're going to spend way too much effort sorting through the slop.
There’s one in particular where a feature I really wanted didn’t exist, so I forked and had Codex 5.5 assist with building the feature on my local version. It works perfectly. My life has been improved in being able to have this feature now.
Normally I’d want to share it back with the community so others can benefit as well (presumably if I wanted this feature, others probably want it too.) But…I am not pretending this is perfect, great, or even good code. I spent about an hour total on it - it works, I haven’t had any issues with it, but it’s probably slop by any hard-core engineering account. And I neither want to get attacked for submitting slop nor do I have the time to properly engineer it to be hand-coded, so the net result is that it lives on my machine alone.
Is this the right outcome? I feel guilty that I’m getting a better version of this software and others aren’t. I want to help makes others lives easier too, but I don’t want to burden the project maintainers or get yelled at for submitting slop.
What’s the future look like here?
Second, it is not a given that your change would be accepted regardless of who wrote it. Maybe the feature is too niche for its complexity, maybe it is better implemented with more generality or extensibility that does not make sense for your own use. In those cases, your change might have been rejected upstream, so having it only locally is a perfect fine solution.
Third, if you believe it is actually useful for broader users, open an issue requesting that feature, and say LLM implemented it in an hour. Then the maintainers can prompt their own LLM to implement it with ease, or do whatever they want with their project.
I feel like the issue is people contributing code they don't understand and presenting it as if they do.
If you're actually motivated to get a working fix upstream, and you're willing to do more than be a passive player, then it's not necessarily a problem to submit it (subject to responsible disclosure, of course)... but you also say that you don't have the time to properly engineer it, which makes me think you don't have the time to be sufficiently engaged in the upstreaming process anyways.
Why? None of what you did is special. What stops anyone else from asking their AI to implement the same feature you did, if they need it?
I'm glad it works for you, but please do not submit low-effort stuff like this, if you're not willing to do the rest of the work to make it maintainable.
I get the desire to help -- that's fine -- but AI code is abundant and of low value. Don't sandbag them with more work and increase their maintenance burden, with stuff they could easily vibe code themselves.
Yes, if you can't vouch for the quality of the code that is the correct outcome. The long term health and maintainability of an open source project takes precedence over adding another feature. This was the case before repos were flooded with AI slop as well. Virtually no project would have accepted a random code dump if the person submitting it does not understand it because that just means the burden falls on someone else which would very quickly get any software project into big trouble.
I guess it's nice people want to help and AI assisted coding can be fine but I can't imagine submitting a PR to a high-profile, much-revered project like that without reviewing and thoroughly testing it myself.
One of the projects I work on recently had a guy drop by and explain that he wanted to use Claude to clean up our backlog and he absolutely could not fathom why I kept bringing up that we would only accept PRs that reduced our work instead of increasing it. "Do you know what Opus 4.7 is?" "Why are you so close-minded?". Unfortunately it is very hard for these users to understand that the thing they are using has a bar for quality and the bugs that still slip through cannot be solved by waving a magic wand at it.
If these people can make changes to the emulators that will actually make the games more playable for them, the changes don't have to go back into the official project. It works for them and makes things better.
Right now, I've been working on some changes to the mkv container spec to have embedded scripting cable of doing Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in interactive mode. VLC and mpv. I've already added mutable torrent support to Transmission, and it works. But yeh, if someone took a look at it who really knew the code, they'd see it was AI slop and do a hard pass.