this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Except for all the time of the maintainers that's being wasted. Time that is very finite and that for many of these people is a thankless unpaid job that they're donating their nights and weekends towards doing.
Which perhaps means that it shouldn't be thankless and the technology, since it exists, should be used to screen contributions.
Someone at work accidentally enabled the copilot PR screening bot for everybody on the whole codebase. It put a bunch of warnings on my PRs about the way I was using a particular framework method. Its suggested fix? To use the method that had been deprecated 2 major versions ago. I was doing it the way that the framework currently deems correct.
A problem with using a bot which uses statistical likelihood to determine correctness is that historical datasets are likely to contain old information in larger quantities than updated information. This is just one problem with having these bots review code, there are many more. I have yet to see a recommendation from one which surpassed the quality of a traditional linter.
They should make some kind of layered models, where the user sets weight to layers.
But in any case, this is not what I necessarily meant, just that a big project relying upon unpaid maintainers is flawed, especially when somebody makes real buck on it.
There have been plenty of cases of state actors putting in backdoors. Those were human, most likely, and not some bots.
Or, hear me out, we can acknowledge that the quantity of information and experience necessary to review code properly far exceeds the context windows and architecture of even the most well resourced LLMs available. Especially for big projects.
You can hammer a nail with the blunt end of a screwdriver, but it's neither efficient nor scalable, even before considering the option of choosing the right tool for the job in the first place.
This can also apply to spam e-mails. We can acknowledge that the problem doesn't depend on whether we want to have it.
If you already agree that the contributions could very well be worthless crap, why would you use a second layer of worthless crap to gatekeep them?
If you want to care about people doing the thankless jobs, why would you double the amount of crap they have to sort through?
To expose places where people work thanklessly guaranteeing someone's pretty thankful bottom lines? Working for free isn't altruism, it's hurting other workers. For example.
You know, sometimes this capitalism thing seems wiser looking from a pretty marxist standpoint, than other not very well thought through schemes.
Oh, I see. So it's disdain for the open source community, is it.
I think this sentence made me throw up in my mouth a little... for several reasons.
FOSS has nothing to do with working for free. A freeware program author can work for free and not touch FOSS. A FOSS project can be developed only by people paid wages for that.
Economic illiteracy is like that.
OK, everyone can work whatever way they want. I just was in a mood.