alt Hacker NewsI help maintaining one of these awesome lists, awesome-javascript, since 2018. There's been always self-promoting or similar activities, or someone coming up with an idea/forking a repository and doing some small changes, then thinking they're suggesting something groundbreaking. Because of this, we needed to add a few checks over the years to the pull request template, that basically asks if the resource is out there for a while, actively maintained, actively used by people, etc.
Recently, thanks to AI being this cheap and accessible, the amount of shitty PRs quadrupled if not more. And the worst part? Agent doesn't care about the checklist at all and re-writing the PR body with bunch of nonsense that we maintainers need to read, understand, and evaluate. I started keeping the score for the most shittiest PR based on how soon after the first commit made they open the PR. It was 11h, then 10h, and now it is 6h. How on earth a 6h old repository with zero user is considered "awesome" I don't know, but people should stop prompting their agents to create 10s of these PRs every day.
Yes, there's always an alternative: stop maintaining these lists. I don't think it's a viable option either. Sometimes you start using a new piece of tech and want to have access to somewhat curated list of resources that might speed up your understanding. There's still a bit of value to keep them alive and it's dying out bit by bit (literally) every time someone mass-creates these spammy PRs.
Thanks for reading my unsolicited rant.
Replies
> Agent doesn't care about the checklist at all and re-writing the PR body with bunch of nonsense that we maintainers need to read, understand, and evaluate
If it can’t follow a simple checklist, it shouldn’t be a problem, because you don’t even see the PR, because it should be auto-closed.
> How on earth a 6h old repository with zero user is considered "awesome"
It’s not, and you can write a bot that auto-closes such PRs (and any PR from an obviously AI account, and I wish pangram was cheaper, but any PR that is obviously AI text).
> Yes, there's always an alternative: stop maintaining these lists.
Or use your own AI judge agent to filter out the submissions that clearly don't align with the intention of the list.
unsolicited rant read and appreciated.
(suggestions to expand it will be made in a dedicated PR /s)
Great to read that there are still people out there sifting through the noise of Agents shooting PRs in all directions.
In the end you may have to recruit an AI agent to do the (pre) review, otherwise you're ending up being the only human driver on an automated highway (place mental image of Will Smith in I-Robot here)
Keep up the great work, it's appreciated!
In the age of unlimited and very fast content production (for any media, code, images, music, text, or otherwise), I think content curation like this may be more desired than ever.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but personally it would lower the burden on me so much to have a curated list of *awesome* projects.
The fact that another person has taken from their time, so the hundreds or thousands of people reading this list don't have to do the same amount of investigation to figure out if a project is truly awesome, is in itself awesome.