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A comment on Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI. Parent comment

Re:Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports ... by exsomet on Wednesday December 25, 2024 @12:20AM (#42507020)
Genuine curiosity - admittedly these sorts of “contributors” probably aren’t doing it out of a passion for FOSS or any particular project, but if it’s something that fixes an issue (however small) is that actually a net negative for the project?

Maybe I have some sort of bias, but it feels like a lot of the projects I see specifically request help with these sorts of low-hanging-fruit contributions (lumping typos in with documentation).

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Re:Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports ... by marcus0x62 on Wednesday December 25, 2024 @06:35AM (#42508298)
I don't think these PRs are a net negative for a project - I've never turned one down, anyway. I just don't understand what the contributor gets out of the arrangement, other than Github badges. Some theories I've held:

1) They want/intend to contribute more and are starting small, but either get overwhelmed, lose interest, don't have enough time, etc.

2) They are students padding their resumes (making small PRs so they can say they contributed to x-number of open source projects.)

3) Its just the Github badges.

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Re:Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports ... by Suppafly on Thursday December 26, 2024 @12:58PM (#42516623)
>1) They want/intend to contribute more and are starting small, but either get overwhelmed, lose interest, don't have enough time, etc

Yeah that's essentially how people are encouraged to start contributing to open source projects, making small changes and cleaning up documentation and such. It's hard to allow for this while also preventing the other two categories.

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