s/Django/the codebase/g, and the point stands against any repo for which there is code review by humans:
> If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.
> Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it.
> In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes the transparency and vulnerability of being a human.
> For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human.
> This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.
I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I am seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond to feedback on their behalf.
There is little doubt that if we as an industry fail to establish and defend a healthy culture for this sort of thing, it's going to lead to a whole lot of rot and demoralization.
genthree 7 minutes ago [-]
AI autocomplete and suggestions built-in to Jira are making our ticket tracker so goddamn spammy that I’m 100% sure that “feature” has done more harm than good.
I don’t think anybody’s tracking the actual net-effects of any of this crap on productivity, just the “vibes” they get in the moment, using it. “I got my part of this particular thing done so fast!”
I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of organizations are usefully tracking overall productivity to begin with. Too hard, too expensive. They might “track” it, but so poorly it’s basically meaningless. I don’t think they’ve turned that around on a dime just to see if the c-suite’s latest fad is good or bad (they never want a real answer to that kind of question anyway)
RobRivera 34 minutes ago [-]
LLMs are to open source contributions as photoshop os to Tinder.
savolai 4 minutes ago [-]
Or tinder to photoshop. Or tinder to instagram to fb to geocities to newsgroups/bbs.
25 minutes ago [-]
module1973 24 seconds ago [-]
It's like every new innovation at this point is exacerbating the problem of us choosing short term rewards over long time horizon rewards. The incentive structure simply doesn't support people who want to view things from the bird's eye view. Once you see game theory, you really can't unsee it.
kanzure 59 minutes ago [-]
I like the idea of donating money instead of tokens. I think django contributors are likely to know how to spend those tokens better than I might, as I am not a django core contributor.
Some projects ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 ) are setting a norm to disclose AI usage. Another project simply decided to pause contributions from external parties ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 ). Instead of accepting driveby pull requests, contributors have to show a proof of work by working with one of the other collaborators.
There's definitely an aspect here where the commons or good will effort of collaborators is being infringed upon by external parties who are unintentionally attacking their time and attention with low quality submissions that are now cheaper than ever to generate. It may be necessary to move to a more private community model of collaboration ( https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3ph... ).
Curious what simon thinks about using an LLM to work on Django...
I've used an LLM to create patches for multiple projects. I would not have created said work without LLMs. I also reviewed the work afterward and provided tests to verify it.
MidnightRider39 18 minutes ago [-]
Great message but I wonder if the people who do everything via LLM would even care to read such a message.
And at what point is it hard/impossible to judge whether something is entirely LLM or not? I sometimes struggle a lot with this being OSS maintainer myself
doug_durham 2 minutes ago [-]
"the people who do everything via LLM". That's a bit of a straw man characterization. I don't believe that there are many professional developers "do everything with an LLM'. I don't even know what that statement means.
comboy 19 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps we should start making LLM- open source projects (clearly marked as such). Created by LLMs, open for LLM contributions, with some clearly defined protocols I'd be interesting where it would go. I imagine it could start as a project with a simple instruction file to include in your project to try to find abstractions which can be useful to others as a library and look for specific kind of libraries. Some people want to help others even if they are sharing effectively money+time rather than their skill.
Although I'm afraid big part of these LLM contributions may be people trying to build their portfolio. Some known project contributor sounds better than having some LLM generated code under your name.
Cpoll 17 minutes ago [-]
Moltbook meets GitHub? Sounds like a billion dollar valuation (sarcasm tag deliberately omitted).
thewebguyd 8 minutes ago [-]
Actually, I'd want to see that. All the AI companies keep saying it will take our jobs, human developers won't be necessary.
Well let them put their money where their mouth is. Let's see what happens, see what the agents create or fail to create. See if we end up with a new OS, kernel all the way up to desktop environment.
yuppiepuppie 54 minutes ago [-]
I love Django. Ive been using it professionally and on side projects extensively for the past 10 years. Plus I maintain(ed) a couple highly used packages for Django (django-import-export and django-dramatiq).
Last year, I had some free time to try to contribute back to the framework.
It was incredibly difficult. Difficult to find a ticket to work on, difficult to navigate the codebase, difficult to get feedback on a ticket and approved.
As such, I see the appeal of using an LLM to help first time contributors. If I had Claude code back then, I might have used it to figure out the bug I was eventually assigned.
I empathize with the authors argument tho. God knows what kind of slop they are served everyday.
This is all to say, we live in a weird time for open source contributors and maintainers. And I only wish the best for all of those out there giving up their free time.
Dont have any solutions ATM, only money to donate to these folks.
manfre 38 minutes ago [-]
There is a clear correlation between the rise in LLM use and the volume of PRs and bug reports. Unfortunately, this has predominately increased the volume of submissions and not the overall quality. My view of the security issues reported, many are clearly LLM generated and at face value don't seem completely invalid, so they must be investigated. There was a recent Django blog post about this [1].
The fellows and other volunteers are spending a much greater amount of time handling the increased volume.
I picked up a change that had broad consensus and quite a bit of excitement over even by some core devs.
That ticket now just sits there. The implementation is done, the review is done, there are no objections. But it's not merged.
I think something is deeply wrong and I have no idea what it is.
yuppiepuppie 11 minutes ago [-]
Have you tried pinging in the Discord about it?
gedy 8 minutes ago [-]
I agree somewhat, as I deal with an internal legacy codebase that's pretty hard to follow, and I use Gemini, Claude, etc to help learn, debug solutions and even propose solutions. But there's a big difference in using it as a learning tool and just having the LLM "do it". I see little value in first time contributors just leaning on an LLM to just do it.
pgwalsh 34 minutes ago [-]
Thank you. django-dramatiq has been fantastic.
yuppiepuppie 25 minutes ago [-]
Awesome! Glad you like it :)
crimsoneer 23 minutes ago [-]
For anybody else in this position, would heavily plug the djangonauts program
yuppiepuppie 18 minutes ago [-]
I applied to the djangonauts twice - but was rejected both times. I always liked the idea, but perhaps my profile was not what they were looking for /shrug
butILoveLife 7 minutes ago [-]
DAE see the Anti-AI OSS communities as dying when they say stuff like this?
I think its denial.
Don't get me wrong, I think code reviews are extremely important. However, the amount of useful features I developed for my own software, for other's software, chrome, my OS, etc... in literal seconds has been all the evidence I need.
"It doesnt scale, security, whatever"
Sure, but my ROI has been in the 10x+. If you can't apply something at 10x to your company, its a personal issue.
You don't need to be 10x. Heck 1.1x is better than a human. Not adjusting to this new normal will be the death and replacement.
I'm still trying to figure out what my job will be in the future. I liked that HN thread about 'Context' being the new thing in 2026. I agree, I know the magic words. "Prompt Engineer" may actually be a thing.
orsorna 8 minutes ago [-]
Someone better let Simon know!
akkartik 24 minutes ago [-]
Very well said.
keybored 23 minutes ago [-]
Incredibly milquetoast. I would not like to work with anyone who goes against these points.
kshri24 15 minutes ago [-]
Isn't the meaning of milquetoast opposite to what you are probably trying to convey?
nchmy 7 minutes ago [-]
I think they don't understand what milquetoast actually means, as the post defintiely isn't - django quite clearly asserted themselves and their rules.
What the parent comment was probably trying to say was something like "a completely reasonable, uncontroversial post that I'm glad to see them make", but chose milquetoast (a word that no normal human ever uses - and certainly not in casual conversation) due to an affectation of one kind or another.
keybored 7 minutes ago [-]
Is it?
54 minutes ago [-]
robutsume 11 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
readitalready 42 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
positive-spite 32 minutes ago [-]
In that case I encourage you to build Django with your LLM of choice.
Do what the Django team does, and be of service to the public!
I challange you to prove that Django is sloppier than your LLM-Version
Now, what we’ve been told about models is that they’re only as good as their training data. And so languages with gargantuan amounts of training data ought to fare best, right? Turns out that models kind of universally suck at Python and Javascript (comparatively). The top performing languages (independent of model) are C#, Racket, Kotlin, and standing at #1 is Elixir.
I am using Claude Code with Elm, a very obscure language, and I find that it's amazing at it.
_joel 20 minutes ago [-]
50 day old account, are you even a real person or a clawdbot? (such are the times we live in)
weli 7 minutes ago [-]
Beggars can't be choosers. I decide how and what I want to donate. If I see a cool project and I want to change something (in what I think) is an improvement, I'll clone it, have CC investigate the codebase and do the change I want, test it and if it works nicely I'll open a PR explaining why I think this is a good change.
If the maintainers don't want to merge it for whatever reasons that's fine and nature of open source, but I think its petty to tell that same user who opened the PR you should have donated money instead of tokens.
Rendered at 16:14:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.
> Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it.
> In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes the transparency and vulnerability of being a human.
> For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human.
> This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.
I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I am seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond to feedback on their behalf.
There is little doubt that if we as an industry fail to establish and defend a healthy culture for this sort of thing, it's going to lead to a whole lot of rot and demoralization.
I don’t think anybody’s tracking the actual net-effects of any of this crap on productivity, just the “vibes” they get in the moment, using it. “I got my part of this particular thing done so fast!”
I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of organizations are usefully tracking overall productivity to begin with. Too hard, too expensive. They might “track” it, but so poorly it’s basically meaningless. I don’t think they’ve turned that around on a dime just to see if the c-suite’s latest fad is good or bad (they never want a real answer to that kind of question anyway)
Some projects ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 ) are setting a norm to disclose AI usage. Another project simply decided to pause contributions from external parties ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 ). Instead of accepting driveby pull requests, contributors have to show a proof of work by working with one of the other collaborators.
Another project has started to decline to let users directly open issues ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460319 ).
There's definitely an aspect here where the commons or good will effort of collaborators is being infringed upon by external parties who are unintentionally attacking their time and attention with low quality submissions that are now cheaper than ever to generate. It may be necessary to move to a more private community model of collaboration ( https://gnusha.org/pi/bitcoindev/CABaSBax-meEsC2013zKYJnC3ph... ).
edit: Also I applaud the debian project for their recent decision to defer and think harder about the nature of this problem. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324087
I've used an LLM to create patches for multiple projects. I would not have created said work without LLMs. I also reviewed the work afterward and provided tests to verify it.
Although I'm afraid big part of these LLM contributions may be people trying to build their portfolio. Some known project contributor sounds better than having some LLM generated code under your name.
Well let them put their money where their mouth is. Let's see what happens, see what the agents create or fail to create. See if we end up with a new OS, kernel all the way up to desktop environment.
Last year, I had some free time to try to contribute back to the framework.
It was incredibly difficult. Difficult to find a ticket to work on, difficult to navigate the codebase, difficult to get feedback on a ticket and approved.
As such, I see the appeal of using an LLM to help first time contributors. If I had Claude code back then, I might have used it to figure out the bug I was eventually assigned.
I empathize with the authors argument tho. God knows what kind of slop they are served everyday.
This is all to say, we live in a weird time for open source contributors and maintainers. And I only wish the best for all of those out there giving up their free time.
Dont have any solutions ATM, only money to donate to these folks.
The fellows and other volunteers are spending a much greater amount of time handling the increased volume.
[1] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2026/feb/04/recent-tren...
That ticket now just sits there. The implementation is done, the review is done, there are no objections. But it's not merged.
I think something is deeply wrong and I have no idea what it is.
I think its denial.
Don't get me wrong, I think code reviews are extremely important. However, the amount of useful features I developed for my own software, for other's software, chrome, my OS, etc... in literal seconds has been all the evidence I need.
"It doesnt scale, security, whatever"
Sure, but my ROI has been in the 10x+. If you can't apply something at 10x to your company, its a personal issue.
You don't need to be 10x. Heck 1.1x is better than a human. Not adjusting to this new normal will be the death and replacement.
I'm still trying to figure out what my job will be in the future. I liked that HN thread about 'Context' being the new thing in 2026. I agree, I know the magic words. "Prompt Engineer" may actually be a thing.
What the parent comment was probably trying to say was something like "a completely reasonable, uncontroversial post that I'm glad to see them make", but chose milquetoast (a word that no normal human ever uses - and certainly not in casual conversation) due to an affectation of one kind or another.
Do what the Django team does, and be of service to the public!
I challange you to prove that Django is sloppier than your LLM-Version
Meanwhile, a different take:
Now, what we’ve been told about models is that they’re only as good as their training data. And so languages with gargantuan amounts of training data ought to fare best, right? Turns out that models kind of universally suck at Python and Javascript (comparatively). The top performing languages (independent of model) are C#, Racket, Kotlin, and standing at #1 is Elixir.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47410349
If the maintainers don't want to merge it for whatever reasons that's fine and nature of open source, but I think its petty to tell that same user who opened the PR you should have donated money instead of tokens.