"A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds."
"A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds."
https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers
> LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
I think assuming a writer had your best intentions in mind has been unwise for quite some time. Murdoch built an empire exploiting this assumption.
And to be clear, it is reasonable to expect an author to invest more effort than a reader, because the work in question will reach many more readers and demand time and attention from all of them.
This principle was a part of basic netiquette back in the days of Usenet. I wish I could find the document (maybe it was a FAQ?) where I first saw it stated succinctly.
We still need some mechanism for determining which humans have enough long-term commitment to become maintainers. Source contributions are no longer a reliable signal for that, and I don't know what future signal we'll use going forward. That's going to be a hard problem.
But, who knows, if AI really does make programmers radically more productive, maybe successful open source projects don't need a large maintainer team.