My Pavlov reaction when I see the Claude icon next to the committer is: not touching this. Is trust in OSS now completely gone?
Same concept, but github repos now.
We’ve had low quality code for as long as we’ve had programmable machines. I’ve seen a lot of manually written bad code well before LLMs took over. Nowadays, I primarily look at how long a repo has been around and how active it is. A repo that has consistent activity is probably going to be a higher quality one. Even better if I can follow PRs to see how the code base is evolving.
I will admit it’s become more difficult to tell low quality git repos from higher quality ones. Missing files or incomplete README files are a thing of the past. Claude is very good at filling in the gaps to make all repos at least appear respectable.
I appreciate the effort. May I ask how do you tackle this?
But now other people's code is just a starting point for me forking an app to do exactly what I want it to - it's inspiration because code is cheap.
Of course for larger projects we will still need solid components underlying them, but what you're really talking about is just maturity - it's very easy to produce a lot of output now but you can't replace actual history or having more then exactly 1 maintainer.
Jokes aside, Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 are on another level. I was recently vibe coding an app, and after three days of prompting or so: sigh “I need to bite the bullet, and finally face the slop” — I started to read the code, and to my surprise, it was adequate. Not an amazing code, not a slop either.
I cleaned it up in one session. 50k LoC of Golang. Although even language is less important nowadays. People make DSL, and LLMs immediately start programming on this DSL.