Hacker News Reader

Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

> Agent doesn't care about the checklist at all and re-writing the PR body with bunch of nonsense that we maintainers need to read, understand, and evaluate

If it can’t follow a simple checklist, it shouldn’t be a problem, because you don’t even see the PR, because it should be auto-closed.

> How on earth a 6h old repository with zero user is considered "awesome"

It’s not, and you can write a bot that auto-closes such PRs (and any PR from an obviously AI account, and I wish pangram was cheaper, but any PR that is obviously AI text).

View on HN

He didn't ask if a 6h old repo is awesome or not. Of course it's not.

Ok, repo age being one of hundreds of red flags. Each of these can be auto-detected. But each auto-detection rule will be known and can be gamed afterwards.

Age is probably one of the metrics that could take the longest to abuse, since it directly goes against the instant-gratification that the agent-runners are looking for. Requiring the a repo be around for a couple months doesn't sound too bad.

Someone might grab an old repository and just keep force-pushing new content and thus repurposing it, but if you can find a quick check against that (probably a log somewhere), I think it has a fairly good chance of weeding out the noise.

Just to be this pedantic, every single awesome repo was at some point 6h old, and hopefully they were awesome already.

Were they? I'd expect that even a project that becomes "awesome" was at best "okay" or "promising" at 6h.

Yes, we were all 6h old babies at some point. Some of us became great people, some of us became terrorists or worse. Takes some time to see where we end up with. No different for these resources, especially the repositories. If it's an internal tool that's heavily used, then made public with a wiped history, maybe your argument is correct but if it's a never-done-before/new approach to any problem, it needs some time to see the traction and proof.

There's also some form of outcome bias here. You're judging the resource/repository/library/whatever from today's learnings and standards, but it took this amount of time to reach here, maybe do-over multiple times, 100s or 1000s of commits and clearly none of these were there when it was only 6h old.

If by "hopefully they were awesome already" you mean "hopefully deserved gaining widespread traction in the first 6h", then absolutely no. Try the analogy with something physical (like an airplane) to see how ridiculous it sounds. No passenger should've gotten on $the_absolute_most_awesome_vehicle until it had passed the stress and crash tests, been certified, etc.

I don’t think Linux was very good 6 hours in

It’s easier to make the rules than game them; ultimately you’re the arbiter, so once you recognize slop, create a new rule that filters it and nothing legitimate.

“Must have six months of active development” beats every slop I’ve seen yet (and we’ll see in six months, but vibe coding has already existed for longer). “Must appear in a popular app (by my judgement), be vouched by someone I trust, or exist before 2024” would probably accept most legitimate “awesome” repos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com