The origin of the problems with low-quality drive-by requests is github's social nature[0]. AI doesn't help, but it's not the cause.

I've seen my share of zero-effort drive-by "contributions" so people can pad their GH profile, long before AI, on tiny obscure projects I have published there: larger and more prominent projects have always been spammed.

If anything, the AI-enabled flood will force the reckoning that was long time coming.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46731646

I feel this is a bit too pessimistic. For example, people can make tutorials that auto-certify in vouch. Or others can write agent skills that share etiquette, which agents must demonstrate usage of before PRs can be created.

Yes, there's room for deception, but this is mostly about superhuman skills and newcomer ignorance and a new eternal September that we'll surely figure out

Vouch is a good quick fix, but it has some properties that can lead to collapsed states, discussed in the article linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811

> that's all going to go away and everyone is going to fall back on credentials and social standing.

Only if you allow people like this to normalize it.

.. all revolving around a proprietary Microsoft service.

Support Microsoft or be socially shunned?

argueably, the years 2015-2020, we should have gone back to social standing.

I guess you could say the same about a lot of craft- or skill-based professions that ultimately got heavily automated.

It also marks the end of the open source movement as the value of source code has lost any meaning with vibe coding and ai.