Nextcloud has joined a growing list of projects, including Curl, that have ended their bug‑bounty partnerships with HackerOne due to an unmanageable surge of low‑effort, AI‑generated security reports. I received the fol…
I too have started to receive such PRs to review and it’s soul crushing.
– I don’t understand what you were thinking here, these changes make no sense to me, could you please be so kind and explain to me why you think this would be an improvement?
– I don’t know, the LLM just suggested it.
At what point do you just ban the mf from making PR’s?
What makes you think that I didn’t?
Fair lol
What I don’t get is- these people are disingenuous or actually think theyre helping.
Helping how? The owner of the repo can submit code to your bullshit machine the exact same way. What value are you producing?
Anecdote: there is this annual event called Hacktoberfest for promoting OSS contribution. It offers various merchandise as reward for PRs that get merged as part of the event. A few years back, someone posted a YouTube video trying to promote the event, and demonstrated how to to create a PR by going to some repository and adding some arbitrary text to the README.
What he wanted to convey: “this is the procedure for sending contributions”
What people understood: “you can win a free t-shirt by making small changes to non-code text”
The result: https://joel.net/how-one-guy-ruined-hacktoberfest2020-drama
LLMs did not create this problem. The desire to make bullshit contributions in order to be seen as contributing seems to a basic human need. At least - for some humans. Generative AI did make it so much worse, though, because it’s so good at bullshitting that you have to waste time and spend mental resources in order to recognize the bullshit.
This remains a great mystery to me. As far as I can see, all they achieve is to waste time and resources for everyone involved, including themselves, without creating anything of value to anyone. It’s truly baffling.
It makes them feel good. Like they done something positive. It’s utterly pathetic and I despise these people with no skills, no ability to create anything of their own.





