One of our developers just spent an hour assessing and reviewing a pull request on one of our security projects in Rust. About 2000 lines of code changed, backed by a 200 line description which, luckily, explicitly stated: "I am not a Rust developer or security expert" and "This code was generated with assistance from Claude".
I asked "Why did you spend an hour on this?" and they replied "This seemed to be coming from a young, enthusiastic coder trying to do their best for an open source project. I didn't just want to shut the door in their face without a proper explanation."
This made me think. There's a lot of AI-slop bashing, and sure, we now definitely need a policy too to protect ourselves from it becoming a time sink. But I think we shouldn't forget the often good intentions that are behind these contributions. There is an educational aspect here as well, especially for a younger generation of software developers who think AI gives them programming powers beyond their wildest dreams.
We honestly welcome contributions, but as guardians of our code base we often feel that the timing doesn't quite line up with our planning, the design choices don't quite match the existing or desired architecture, and now, with AI, it becomes easier than ever to put a lot of code on our doorstep to review. Contributors may feel they're doing something good, without considering the consequences on the receiving end.
So, I think our contributing guidelines should start with "Before you start coding, talk to us first."
#Compassion #MentalHealth #OpenSource #AI #AISlop #SoftwareDevelopment #ProductManagement #rustlang
