It's a signal. People want better jobs. That's why we get AI-generated PRs. We told everyone, in order to get your resume taken seriously, you need to show your work.
When I was getting started in my career, that meant having your own website that you contribute to regularly. So I did that. I built websites, I maintained them. I kept maintaining them even after I got the jobs because that's how I actually honed my web programming skills. Where else was I going to try new frameworks, a new JavaScript paradigm, or try out Ruby on rails?
I got the job, and I advised other developers to follow the same path. But then github became mainstream. Rather than just show a finished website, you could actually share the code that runs your project. Share a link to your github project and companies can review your code and directly gauge your experience. But even better, you can show your contribution to open source projects. Not just any projects. Popular projects. The github stars became a metric people look for. A signal that can be used to quickly assign a value to a candidate.
But that’s the story told from the outside. I don’t think the github profile link was ever important, unless it was significantly good. Employees focused on their work rarely have the time to maintain healthy github activity. Their experience comes from their day to day job. So for the most part, not much attention was placed on github links other than skimming through those surface level details.
When stacks of resumes came on my desk, the best candidates stood out because they had work experience. The good candidates had projects that they could link to, github or elsewhere. But then, the worst candidates had long padded resumes that had elements of every job application tips-and-tricks-article. They had a website, but it was built in a day for the purpose of getting a job, with nothing interesting to say. They had github links, but those often pointed to school projects, homework, or boilerplate code. That’s the vast majority of github links I used to get.
People with active and well maintained github profiles were rare. Rare because it actually requires time, effort, and experience. But then we have AI.
There was a golang auth issue that I've contributed to on github. It was already a few years old when I proposed a solution that worked for my case. It wasn't universal so it wasn't accepted. The discussion is revived every couple years, each person bringing one more piece to the puzzle. But then recently, someone exploded the thread with comments. And even created a PR to go with it.
This was from a user that went from a dormant account to 4000 contributions in a year. It was all AI assisted code. This isn’t to comment on the quality of his code, but he was clearly trying to optimize the metric. Looking at his linkedin profile, he doesn’t work in a software engineering role, and it’s hard to decide if he would be a good contributor if hired. If we were to judge his resume by looking at the github profile, it might catch our attention.
But then, there is a problem. There are hundreds, even thousands of people all doing the same thing. They are cranking up their contributions to github projects using AI, so they can have a better chance at getting hired as developers. I understand the job market is rough right now, especially for gen z, and anything to differentiate yourself is a plus. The problem is this is being done at the expense of open source projects.
The contributors are not submitting PRs to your project because they are personally invested in it. Instead, they are trying to get their name on the contributors list so that they can use it as a signal in their resume. When we are out here debating if there is any merit in AI generated PRs, or if we should just judge the code, we tend to miss that their gesture is completely hollow.
The PR’s author intentions are completely misaligned with the project's maintainers. They are playing a different game. We call it slop, or a waste of time, we ban them and they get really vocal about expressing their first amendment rights. We are directly interfering with their goal of padding their resume.
I often ask, why don’t people who create those PRs not just start their own project? One answer I’m starting to believe is, nobody cares about a github profile with a handful of stars. You need to contribute to a popular project. Most if not all AI generated websites look the same, it doesn’t matter how well you customize the prompt. Most greenfield projects from new programmers look the same, the prompter lacks the experience to do anything different.
Contributing to open source is a scary thing when you are new. Even when you have experience, it’s a deliberate act. You have to be invested in the work. Just like asking questions on stackoverflow, issues you raised will often get closed. And when they do, you have to learn from it.
The value of an open source contributor is not in the volume of work they can perform. If you skim any important projects, you’ll see that the best contributors spend more time discussing the problem than writing code. Their value is in solving problems and contributing to the collective memory of the group.
But when you are doing a drive-by PR that may or may not be correct, and you are just trying to get your name on a list, you are providing zero value to the maintainer. Just more work.
This is the signal every slop PR generator is after.