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Comment by thunderbong | Hacker News Reader

Looks to me that the issue is with the PR process, not with open-source.

From the article -

> It's gotten so bad, GitHub added a feature to disable Pull Requests entirely. Pull Requests are the fundamental thing that made GitHub popular. And now we'll see that feature closed off in more and more repos.

I don't have a solution for this, I'm pointing to the flaw in the assumption that AI is destroying open-source.

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The solution is forking. Make a fork, update it to your heart's content. If it is found to be solid later, perhaps it will be studied and forked itself.

Yeah, been thinking that we should let the LLMs run riot on special AI branches— or heck, maybe Microsoft can buy/create AIGitHub.com.

But that's already true. Github lets people make a fork and have their AI run riot on it. What are you really suggesting if not the status quo?

That we embrace it generally. Even just proposing a naming convention would allow for agents to find the AI-sanctioned branch (or create it) and have at it.

(Maybe some AI agents can collaborate on "AILinux" and we can see how it measures up, ha ha.)

Maintainer could just say "No AI please" and refuse PRs that they judge are probably AI. The AI operator can figure out how to make a fork if that's what they want. But they probably don't want that, so no point anybody else creating a system that nobody wants and nobody will use.

Now every contributor has a fork. That's bad for consumers. Forks should be temporary.

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