Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

> I'm happy to test crazy new ideas and throw out what doesn’t work well. It was able to wire & test a huge change to Mumble that added better noise cancelling; I use my beta build of it nearly every day.

To me, this is a negative and mostly irresponsible use of AI.

OP dumped a huge PR (edit: not actually huge) on the Mumble maintainers,[0] which didn't match project conventions. He left a bunch of unresolved conversations with Claude that are hard to follow because it looks like an insane person having a conversation with themselves.

Then, the Mumble maintainers gave him pretty polite, patient feedback, and he just ignored it. No follow up for going on three months. Granted, the maintainers left the PR in the queue for four months, so it's not like OP is the slowest link, but I definitely wouldn't point to this as a win when there's basically no traction on the PR or any indication this will be merged.

[0] https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/pull/7180

Edit: radlad is correct that the PR is not "huge" at ~300 LOC. I was reading on my phone and didn't check the PR size and mistakenly trusted OP's assessment of "huge."

I dunno - it looks funny, and can definitely add to the "noise" versus the signal of the PR. But it also demonstrates to the maintainers what level of input the contributor had versus simply posting the first thing Claude came up with. (And can be helpful as a maintainer to see how the contributor is thinking about the problem.)

The maintainers clarified they'd prefer a single "all-in" commit, and OP hasn't (yet) addressed that.

Also, unless I'm misreading this PR, it's 270 lines added, 20 removed. I certainly wouldn't call that "huge."

His change is +270 where +70 is a readme.

This is not a huge PR under any software project in the world.

holy shit this so funny, using the pull request to review himself

I thought it was pretty common? Pre-LLMs I've always opened PRs to self-review before asking anyone to review it (sometimes leaving myself comments), now I'm also having an agent review it and leaving its own comments that I might answer, seems like a very normal thing to do.

I do ensure these self-conversations are resolved so that the PR is clean when I ask other reviewers to have a look, and I don't think I'd do that on an open-source project. But I'm very much shrugging at this practice.

I think what OP did is poor practice. From the maintainer side, how are they supposed to know when the PR is ready for review? Are the maintainers expected to keep checking in on the contributors' threads with themselves to make sure everything is wrapped up?

To me, there's two things you can mean with a PR:

- Open a normal PR: I personally attest to the quality of the code, and I'm ready for the maintainer to review/merge it.

- Open a draft PR: I have questions about proceeding and want to show you a work in progress to give context.

Any kind of intermediate work to prepare it for the maintainers should happen in a fork, not adding noise in the official repo. When you're done experimenting in the fork, then it can go to the main repo.

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