Post #1111347

2026-04-13 00:08 UTC

#Code reviews seem to be the biggest bottleneck in software development right now. Open source package ecosystems are victims of their own success. There&#39;s a long tail of iffy packages that nobody has reviewed, and nobody wants to. For the top projects, maintenance is tough. Stakes are high. Reviews are hard. Contributions are meh quality (even before LLMs). It&#39;s not just code, but a people problem too. GitHub&#39;s primitive workflow wastes everyone&#39;s time. Something&#39;s gonna break.

Replies (3)

@kornel@mastodon.social 2026-04-13 00:27

LLMs can spit code-alike outputs 24/7, faster than humans can read it. This is a DoS attack on open source. A maintainer can't trust that the person submitting a PR has properly reviewed the code, so they have to do all the review work anyway. There's zero benefit. If the maintainer wanted LLM-generated code, they could ask an LLM themselves, and skip the trust issues and slowness of dealing with a random middleman submitting it. Something's gonna break.

Open ##1134644
@Di4na@hachyderm.io 2026-04-13 10:43

@kornel@mastodon.social it always was. I really need to publish this blogpost

Open ##2659285
@mcc@mastodon.social 2026-04-13 14:48

@kornel@mastodon.social It seems to me that the reasoning in this thread is a good argument why, among a number of other reasons, we need to be building out an alternative open source community where use of LLMs is banned by project policy, community mores, and if possible the software license. Nothing else preserves the open source community in a form that resembles what it once was, or for that matter a form worth keeping around

Open ##2659286