This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/FunBrilliant5713 on 2026-01-04 03:34:55+00:00.

I’ve been following the AI slop problem closely and it seems like it’s getting worse, not better.

The situation:

  • Daniel Stenberg (curl) said the project is “effectively being DDoSed” by AI-generated bug reports. About 20% of submissions in 2025 were AI slop. At one point, volume spiked to 8x the usual rate. He’s now considering whether to shut down their bug bounty program entirely.
  • OCaml maintainers rejected a 13,000-line AI-generated PR. Their reasoning: reviewing AI code is more taxing than human code, and mass low-effort PRs "create a real risk of bringing the Pull-Request system to a halt."
  • Anthony Fu (Vue ecosystem) and others have posted about being flooded with PRs from people who feed “help wanted” issues directly to AI agents, then loop through review comments like drones without understanding the code.
  • GitHub is making this worse by integrating Copilot into issue/PR creation — and you can’t block it or even tell which submissions came from Copilot.

The pattern:

People (often students padding resumes, or bounty hunters) use AI to mass-generate PRs and bug reports. The output looks plausible at first glance but falls apart under review. Maintainers — mostly unpaid volunteers — waste hours triaging garbage.

Some are comparing this to Hacktoberfest 2020 (“Shitoberfest”), except now it’s year-round and the barrier is even lower.

What I’m wondering:

Is anyone building tools to help with this? Not “AI detection” (that’s a losing game), but something like:

  • Automated triage that checks if a PR actually runs, addresses the issue, or references nonexistent functions
  • Cross-project contributor reputation — so maintainers can see “this person has mass-submitted 47 PRs across 30 repos with a 3% merge rate” vs "12 merged PRs, avg 1.5 review cycles"
  • Better signals than just “number of contributions”

The data for reputation is already in the GitHub API (PR outcomes, review cycles, etc). Seems like someone should be building this.

For maintainers here: What would actually help you? What signals do you look at when triaging a PR from an unknown contributor?