Then where are all the amazing open source programs written by individuals by themselves? Where are all the small businesses supposedly assisted by AI?
> 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026.
Doesn’t look like goal-post moving to me. GP argued that AI isn’t making a difference, because if it was, we’d see amazing AI-generated open source projects. (Edit: taking a second look, that’s not exactly what GP said, but that’s what I took away from it. Obviously individuals create open source projects all the time.)
You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions are AI generated.
GP countered (somewhat indirectly) by arguing that contributions don’t indicate quality, and thus wasn’t sufficient to qualify as “amazing AI-generated open source projects.”
Personally, I agree. The presence of AI contributions is not sufficient to demonstrate “amazing AI-generated open-source projects.” To demonstrate that, you’d need to point to specific projects that were largely generated by AI.
The only big AI-generated projects I’ve heard of are Steve Yegge’s GasTown and Beads, and by all accounts those are complete slop, to the point that Beads has a community dedicated to teaching people how to uninstall it. (Just hearsay. I haven’t looked into them myself.)
So at this point, I’d say the burden of proof is on you, as the original goalposts have not been met.
Edit: Or, at least, I don’t think 4% is enough to demonstrate the level of productivity GP was asking for.
It has been argued for a very long time, lines of code is largely meaningless as a metric. But now that AI is writing those lines... it seems to be meaningful again? I continue to be optimistically skeptical.
It's not a great ask. Who's going to quantify what is 'amazing open source work'?
4% for a single tool used in a particular way (many are out there using AI tools in a way that doesn't make it clear the code was AI authored) is an incredible amount. Don't see how you can look at that and see 'not enough'.
The vast majority of people using these tools aren't announcing it to the world. Why would they ? They use it, it works and that's that.
So we're suddenly going back into measuring lines of code as a useful metric?
Just because people are shitting out endless slop code that they never bothered to throw a 2nd glance at doesn't mean it'sgood or that it's leading to better projects or tools, it literally just means people are pushing code out haphazardly . If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing billions of lines of code added! But none of it is useful in any way.
Same with AI, sure we're generating endless piles of code, but how much of it is actually leading to better software?
It's not the be all end all and there are obviously issues with using it alone, but it's rather silly going the other extreme and pretending it isn't a major factor.
>If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing
1. Well you can't do that
2. Something like that won't register as Claude Code (or any other AI tool) usage anyway
3. Something like that won't come anywhere near 4%
But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number of cases? At least the end result is basically the same, like that Clawdbot or whatever name they've decided to try ride the coattails of guy who has 70k commits in the last few months that I saw being touted as an impressive feat on HN the other day. How much broken, unusable code exists within those 70k commits that ultimately would've had the same effect as if he had just pushed a `--allow-empty` commit thousands of times?
Now whatever, if it's people pushing slop into their own codebase that they own, more power to them, my issue stems from OSS projects being inundated with endless spam MR/PRs from AI hypesters. It's just making maintainer's lives more difficult, and the most annoying part of it all is that they have to put up with people who don't see the effort disparity between them prompting their chatbot to write up some broken bullshit vs the effort required for maintainers to keep up with the spam. It hurts the maintainers, it hurts genuine beginners who would like to learn and contribute to projects, it hurts the projects themselves since they have to waste what precious little time and resources they already have digging through crap, it hurts quite literally everyone who has to deal with it other than the selfish AI-using morons who just take a huge dump over everyone and spouts shit like "Well 4% of all code on Github is now AI-generated!" as if more of that is somehow a good thing.
>But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number of cases?
I mean No not really. I'm not sure why you think that.
>How much broken, unusable code exists within those 70k commits that ultimately would've had the same effect as if he had just pushed a `--allow-empty` commit thousands of times?
How much stable usable code exists within those 70k commits ?
This is pretty much exactly why I said the original question was not a great ask. You have your biases. Show an example and the default response for some almost like a stochastic parrot is, 'Must be slop!". How do you know ? Did you examine it? No, you didn't. That's just what you want to believe so it must be true. It makes for a very frustrating conversation.
They didn’t, amazing open source was asked for, meaningless stats were given. Not that GitHub public repositories were amazing before AI, but nothing has changed since, except AI slop being a new category.
I quickly read through the `sqlite-history-json` project and it's only a few hundred lines of code and the code doesn't use transactions which means that it can fail and leave the state of the code and database in an inconsistent state.
Being only a few hundred lines of code is a pro, not a con (it's 2,800 including tests: https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount?repo=https%3A%2F%2... - lines counted by my vibe-coded port of the classic Perl SLOCCount tool to run in a browser using Perl-in-WebAssembly.)
I lead with sqlite-history-json because I think it's the most impressive of the bunch - it solves a difficult problem in an elegant way with code I would have been proud to write by hand.
Props for your work on these but they’re toys mate. These are things you built for yourself that other people happened to find useful. That’s great! I’m not shitting on that, but it doesn’t really convince me that AI coding really is this amazing productivity booster in all cases. It’s good for small greenfield projects, I’ll admit that.
Six useful small greenfield projects in two weeks is pretty good, especially when they weren't my primary focus for those two weeks.
I wouldn't call these toys either. If you want toys take a look at most of https://tools.simonwillison.net/ - these six are all real projects on GitHub with tests and documentation and release notes.
I feel different: the last line is very important in this context, since it communicates the underlying thoughts and values of the poster.
Asking for "amazing" open source projects in this case is not asking out of genuine curiosity or want for debate, it is a rhetorical question asked out of frustration at the general trajectory of AI and who profits off of it -- namely the boot-wearers.
> Honestly, AI slop PRs are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for #Godot maintainers.
> If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of
> If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of
This is exactly the wrong approach! Funnel even more money away from productive tasks and into AI? Madness![1]
The only viable solution is being quick with a banhammer - maybe someone should start up a spamhaus type list of every github user who submitted AI slop.
Force them to burn these accounts on the very first spam.
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[1] Imagine if we chose this approach to deal with spam - we ask people for more money to hire a warm body to individually verify each email. Do you think spam would be the solved problem it is today?
Prior to industrialization if you wanted to paint something you had to know how to mix your own paints.
And make your own brushes.
Before the printing presses came along, putting up flyers was not even imaginable.
Signs for businesses used to hand carved.
Then printed. A store sign was still produced by a team of professionals, but small businesses coils reasonably afford to print a sign. Not often updated, but it existed.
Then desktop publishing took off. Now lone graphic designers could design and send work off to a print shop. Small businesses could now afford regularly updated menus, signage, and even adverts and flyers.
Now small businesses can make their own creatives. AI can change stylesheets, write ad copy, and generate promotional photos.
Does any of this have the artistry of hand carved signs from 600 years ago? Of course not.
But the point is technology gives individuals control.
People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and soot for at least 50K years for sure, and probably several hundred thousand years in truth. You don't need a brush, you have fingers or a twig.
The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of advertising -- they had an election going on and people just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need flyers lol.
The idea that signs or advertising was "artistry" is deeply ahistorical. The reason old stuff looks real fancy is because labor was extremely cheap and materials were expensive.
> People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and soot for at least 50K years for sure,
Compare those to the pigments used (mixed up!) by professional painters, and then to what printers could make.
If you wanted to paint fine art in the 1400s you were possibly making your own canvases, your own paint brushes, and your own paints.
And on top of that you had to be a skilled painter!
> The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of advertising -- they had an election going on and people just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need flyers lol.
The American revolution included a lot of propaganda courtesy of printing presses and some very rich financers who had a vested interest in a revolution occuring.
Pamphlets everywhere. It is one thing to scribble on a wall, it is another to produce messages at a mass scale.
That sense of scale has been multiplied yet again by AI.
No, that's just the impact that you're not going to hear in the news ("Small business saves a couple of hundred dollars" is not a good headline). But that's not the only "impact of AI". The bigger impacts are reflected in the news and the stock market almost on a daily basis over the last two years.
