Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't have any super popular repos but I do have a few with 500 to 1500 stars and while not necassarily regret, I don't think I've ever gotten a single pull request that I could just acccept as is.

Even though the README links to live tests (browser JS libs), the person submitting the PR rarely includes tests so that's one issue. Sure I can say "I'll be happy to accept this if you could please add some tests?" but then that leads to the 2nd issue. PRs are rarely quality PRs and if I want to add the feature I end up having to re-write whatever they were trying to add from scratch.

I know people are claiming LLMs will make things worse for many projects but an LLM can likely at least read what's there and try to make things that follow the conventions?

I also know I'm under no obligation to accept any PRs. It's not that easy to say no for me, depending on the ask.

If this is something that you want to solve, I've found that having a PR template checklist that asks contributors to include tests helps a lot. Say something to the effect of

[ ] Added unit tests

[ ] Included a screenshot of the code working (this helps reviews go faster)

I post a lot of silly personal code on GitHub and the vast majority of issues/pull requests I receive are completely inane and generally not remotely helpful. Things ranging from "I've added a subtle shadow effect to the title in the readme" (thought it was someone's first pr just to get started but that wasn't even the case) to "I've added support for $obscure_system_youve_never_heard_of" (well meaning but the code is now 4x longer and a maze of ifdefs so maybe you should just keep it in your branch?) to "I tried this on my extremely outdated system that's old enough to vote and it threw an error" (yes it very much will throw an error, none of this can work there and I cannot help you).

But a few people have reported certain fundamental problems with my approaches or have otherwise put in a significant amount of work to debug and fix issues, and they've been extremely helpful and I can only hope I'll get more of them in the future.

Tangentially I'd just add that ttf-parser and Git Oxide made iterating on PRs a breeze. Absolutely a pleasure to contribute to.

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