I'd rather enforce a limit based on the number of PRs that account opened across all public repositories it doesn't have write access to within the last week. And PRs that were closed without getting merged should be held against the account somehow (perhaps via a "close as unwelcome" option for the maintainer).
In my case I sometimes get a flurry of PRs from over-exuberant contributors, not necessarily low quality even! Using this I can at least put some back-pressure on that and help keep things more fair across my contributors.
That strikes me as a bad solution. I've sent plenty of PRs over the last two decades that were things I wasn't sure if upstream wanted or not, but I did the work and wanted to offer it to them. If you get penalized for not having a PR merged, it's going to incentivize selfishness
In any case, my proposal is a rough sketch of how I'd approach the problem, not a production ready algorithm. But I'd expect even that basic approach to work a lot better than github's approach.
This is a band-aid. Maybe even a good band-aid, because it'll keep individual contributors from flooring the zone. But the core problem is Github's model that assumes code is worth reading.
I'm much rather see the agent logs stapled to PRs. Make it easy to understand if there's a brain behind the suggested changes before engaging.
This is the fundamental problem. You have to look at the equilibrium. When you submit a PR, you're asking for some of my time. I have to figure out if it's likely to be worth it for me. If you have a track record of producing useful software that I have merged before, you're putting your reputation at risk when you submit a new PR, so it's probably good. If you start sending AI slop, I'm going to downgrade your reputation.
If you have no track record though, I'll probably at least take a glance since even if I'm not sure, at least you had to spend some time to write the code and put together the PR. Now that's not true.
My guess is we're going to have to create some new systems for reputation, maybe bond posting, maybe "sponsored" PRs, where someone trusted vouches for it, etc.
Incidentally, this doesn't just apply to PRs. It's emails, all kinds of other messages, reports, etc.
I also like the other features mentioned in the blog post. It won't make a difference to me and my daily work, but I'm glad that they are taking the criticisms seriously.
Though I have to admit that I'm a bit conflicted about this. Part of me also wants more people to move off of GitHub to help break their monopoly on code on the web, but I also don't want the people making and maintaining open source to give up their projects due to burnout and slop spam.
If there’s even any minor truth to dead internet theory then it extends to Github most certainly.