Last year, I had some free time to try to contribute back to the framework.
It was incredibly difficult. Difficult to find a ticket to work on, difficult to navigate the codebase, difficult to get feedback on a ticket and approved.
As such, I see the appeal of using an LLM to help first time contributors. If I had Claude code back then, I might have used it to figure out the bug I was eventually assigned.
I empathize with the authors argument tho. God knows what kind of slop they are served everyday.
This is all to say, we live in a weird time for open source contributors and maintainers. And I only wish the best for all of those out there giving up their free time.
Dont have any solutions ATM, only money to donate to these folks.
The fellows and other volunteers are spending a much greater amount of time handling the increased volume.
[1] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/feb/04/recent-tren...
That ticket now just sits there. The implementation is done, the review is done, there are no objections. But it's not merged.
I think something is deeply wrong and I have no idea what it is.
If this is done, you should update it so it appears in the review queue.
...and the next time you hear someone spewing that nonsense, especially at Anthropic, Google or OpenAI, you should think long and hard about how they are selling out your peers in the near-term in the interests of raising capital and boosting their own sales.
> If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.
> Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it.
> In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes the transparency and vulnerability of being a human.
> For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human.
> This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.
I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I am seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond to feedback on their behalf.
There is little doubt that if we as an industry fail to establish and defend a healthy culture for this sort of thing, it's going to lead to a whole lot of rot and demoralization.
I don’t think anybody’s tracking the actual net-effects of any of this crap on productivity, just the “vibes” they get in the moment, using it. “I got my part of this particular thing done so fast!”
I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of organizations are usefully tracking overall productivity to begin with. Too hard, too expensive. They might “track” it, but so poorly it’s basically meaningless. I don’t think they’ve turned that around on a dime just to see if the c-suite’s latest fad is good or bad (they never want a real answer to that kind of question anyway)
I treat jira like product owners treat the code. Which is infinitely humorous to me.
Are people generally unhappy with the outcomes of this? As anecdotally, it does seem to pass review later on. Code is getting through this way.
What the parent comment was probably trying to say was something like "a completely reasonable, uncontroversial post that I'm glad to see them make", but chose milquetoast (a word that no normal human ever uses - and certainly not in casual conversation) due to an affectation of one kind or another.
Milquetoast perfectly describes it, I am happy to see less common words used around here (specially when the convey the intended meaning this precisely), and I find claiming "affectation" of the person who used it unnecessarily rude.
Although I'm afraid big part of these LLM contributions may be people trying to build their portfolio. Some known project contributor sounds better than having some LLM generated code under your name.
Well let them put their money where their mouth is. Let's see what happens, see what the agents create or fail to create. See if we end up with a new OS, kernel all the way up to desktop environment.
> If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.
You'd have to manage the contributions, or get your AI bots to manage them or something, but it would be great to have honeypots like this to attract all the low effort LLM slop.
I watched someone ask Claude to replace all occurrences of a string instead of using a deterministic operation like “Find and Replace” available in the very same VSCode window they prompted Claude from.
If the maintainers don't want to merge it for whatever reasons that's fine and nature of open source, but I think its petty to tell that same user who opened the PR you should have donated money instead of tokens.
It makes it kind of unclear if you don't understand the difference between using CC to "investigate the codebase" so you can make a change which you (implicitly) do understand versus using an LLM to make a plausible looking PR although in actuality "you do not understand the ticket ... you do not understand the solution ... you do not understand the feedback on your PR"
I've used an LLM to create patches for multiple projects. I would not have created said work without LLMs. I also reviewed the work afterward and provided tests to verify it.
[…]
> If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.
I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it. For example, automating code reviews with AI.
"Spending your tokens to support Django by having an LLM work on tickets is not helpful. You and the community are better off donating that money to the Django Software Foundation instead."
Reading beyond the first line makes it clear that the problem is a lack of comprehension, not LLM use itself. Quoting:
> This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed.
> Use an LLM to develop your comprehension. Then communicate the best you can in your own words, then use an LLM to tweak that language. If you’re struggling to convey your ideas with someone, use an LLM more aggressively and mention that you used it. This makes it easier for others to see where your understanding is and where there are disconnects.
> There needs to be understanding when contributing to Django. There’s no way around it. Django has been around for 20 years and expects to be around for another 20. Any code being added to a project with that outlook on longevity must be well understood.
> There is no shortcut to understanding. If you want to contribute to Django, you will have to spend time reading, experimenting, and learning. Contributing to Django will help you grow as a developer.
> While it is nice to be listed as a contributor to Django, the growth you earn from it is incredibly more valuable.
> So please, stop using an LLM to the extent it hides you and your understanding. We want to know you, and we want to collaborate with you.
This advice is 95% not actionable and 100% not verifiable. It's full of hand-wavy good intentions. I understand completely where it's coming from, but 'trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella' is a very good analogy - on one side, you have the above magical thinking, on the other, petaflops of compute which improve their reasoning capabilities exponentially.
(Again, I must emphasize that this is not telling people to not use LLMs, any more than telling people to wear a seatbelt would somehow be telling them to not drive a car.)
Yes, you feel. And the author feels differently. We don't have evidence of what the impact of LLMs will be on a project over the long term. Many people are speculating it will be pure upside, this author is observing some issues with this model and speculating that there will be a detriment long-term.
The operative word here is "speculating." Until we have better evidence, we'll need to go with our hunches & best bets. It is a good thing that different people take different approaches rather than "everyone in on AI 100%." If the author is wrong time will tell.
I share code because I think it might be useful to others. Until very recently I welcomed contributions, but my time is limited and my patience has become exhausted.
I'm sorry I no longer accept PRs, but at the same time I continue to make my code available - if minor tweaks can be made to make that more useful for specific people they still have the ability to do that, I've not hidden my code and it is still available for people to modify/change as they see fit.
You'll have to embrace the `ccc` compiler first, lol
Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not.
One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now part of the hiring process. So people will continue to try to game the system by using LLMs to automate that whole process.
"I have contributed to X, Y, and Z projects" - when they actually have little to no understanding of those projects or exactly how their PR works. It was (somehow) accepted and that's that.
It is not pride to have your name associated with an open source project, it is pride that the code works and the change is efficient. The reviewer should be on top of that.
and I hope an army of OpenClaw agents calls out the discrimination, so gatekeepers recognize that they have to coexist with this species
kanzure•1h ago
Some projects ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 ) are setting a norm to disclose AI usage. Another project simply decided to pause contributions from external parties ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 ). Instead of accepting driveby pull requests, contributors have to show a proof of work by working with one of the other collaborators.
Another project has started to decline to let users directly open issues ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 ).
There's definitely an aspect here where the commons or good will effort of collaborators is being infringed upon by external parties who are unintentionally attacking their time and attention with low quality submissions that are now cheaper than ever to generate. It may be necessary to move to a more private community model of collaboration ( https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3ph... ).
edit: Also I applaud the debian project for their recent decision to defer and think harder about the nature of this problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324087