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Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

164 points by pranav_rajs

by oneeyedpigeon

5 subcomments

We've enjoyed a certain period (at least a couple of decades) of global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life, from open-source to journalism and job interviews.

by sbondaryev

9 subcomments

Seems like reading the code is now the real work. AI writes PRs instantly but reviewing them still takes time. Everything flipped. Expect more projects to follow - maintainers can just use ai themselves without needing external contributions.

by smetj

0 subcomment

Generally speaking, the value of these contributions was determined by "proof of work". Time and effort are precious to a human hence its a somewhat self-regulating system preventing huge amounts of low quality contributions being generated. This is now gone. Isn't that an interesting problem to fix?

by kanzure

1 subcomments

That's interesting; another project stopped letting users directly open issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319

by blibble

0 subcomment

> With luck, GitHub will soon roll out management features that let us open things back up.
I wouldn't bet on it
SlopHub

by kristopolous

0 subcomment

Book publishers have stopped accepting unsolicited submissions for the same reason.
You need a literary agent for just about all of them

by andybak

0 subcomment

> and little to no follow-up engagement from their authors.
A strategy I sometimes use for external contributions is to immediately ask a question about the pull request. Ignoring PRs where I don't get a reply or the reply doesn't make sense potentially eliminates a lot of low quality contributions.
I wonder if a "no AI" rule is an overly blunt instrument. I can sympathise with it but babies and bathwater etc.

by ironbound

0 subcomment

Curl project has had this issue https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...

by octoberfranklin

2 subcomments

> An open pull request represents a commitment from maintainers: that the contribution will be reviewed carefully and considered seriously for inclusion.
This has always been the problem with github culture.
On the Linux and GCC mailing lists, a posted patch does not represent any kind of commitment whatsoever from the maintainers. That's how it should be.
The fact that github puts the number of open PR requests at the very top of every single page related to a project, in an extremely prominent position, is the sort of manipulative "driving engagement" nonsense you'd expect from social media, not serious engineering tools.
The fact that you have to pay github money in order to permanently turn off pull requests or issues (I mean turn off, not automatically close with a bot) is another one of these. BTW codeberg lets any project disable these things.

by junon

4 subcomments

They invited AI in by creating a comprehensive list of instructions for AI agents - in the README, in a context.md, and even as yarn scripts. What did they expect?

by shevy-java

0 subcomment

Didn't take long before the quality went downhill.
Skynet was evil and impressive in The Terminator. Skynet 3.0 in reallife sucks - the AI slop annoys the hell out of me. I now need a browser extension that filters away ALL AI.

by judahmeek

2 subcomments

by lifetimerubyist

0 subcomment

At first I aggressively banned anyone that submitted slop to my projects.
Then I just took my hosting private. I can’t be arsed to put in the effort when they don’t.

by exactlie

2 subcomments

> <BROWN AND WHITE DRAWING OF AN ASSHOLE> claude added the Task issue type 4 hours ago
is this satire?