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Cake day: September 23rd, 2026

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  • page 9’s wording does state that it is maintainer-estimated, and specifies the terms “low-quality” and “slop” as the qualifier for the 25% figure

    I’m not seeing it. This is the sole relevant statement on pg 9 where they simply define AI slop in a general way that avoids tying it in with their measurements:

    “AI slop” are low quality AI-generated contributions that are unlikely to be worth the review time they demand.

    In addition to the explicit ‘and/or general AI use’ statement, there are several red flags here that make me think this is a low quality study to be taken with salt. Or maybe I’m cynical and using the term ‘slop’ to push a research study is both unusual and suspect.


  • you’ll see that “slop” in the survey does not refer to AI-driven PRs in general, but to specifically low-quality AI-generated PRs.

    This part is actually unclear. The question posed to survey participants that allowed researchers to determine a PR was “AI slop” is left out of the report. And this line under the chart showing “25% slop etc.” is troubling:

    Average estimated percentage of incoming PRs that are low-quality and/or AI-generated

    How this particular question was framed is of critical importance here and without it, it’s easy to assume that all reported AI use was broadly categorized as “slop”

    Sadly I could not find a way to access the full list of questions used in the survey to confirm this.





  • I’ve recently been pondering the future impact of AI on coding, while trying to filter out the current noise surrounding the issue (since all it does is muddy the waters). There’s a lot of amateurish supposition to follow, but since you appear to be getting fewer thought out responses than “AI-bad-kill”, take it with a pinch of salt.

    There was a recent article on the open source software that props up the internet - (paraphrasing here) one of these repositories had (pre-AI) a user called Jin Yue or Jin Yin who made hundreds of useful pull requests, gained the trust of the repo maintainer and was eventually given admin privileges, only to surrepticiously merge malicious code when no one was looking (eventually discovered ~a month after the fact). I imagine that (likely) state-sponsored attempts like these will make more use of AI in the future for quicker turnaround, and that maintainers will also eventually use AI to quickly audit submitted code for security flaws.

    As far as open source software channels are concerned, I imagine there will be a decent amount of low effort malicious software that makes heavy use of AI, submitted to these channels. In such an environment, whether or not users are permitted to candidly disclose AI usage without reprisal will likely make a huge difference, since honest disclosure would invite security-minded people to audit fault-prone AI-assisted code - something that malware distributers will try to avoid at all costs (thereby allowing a distinction that can be leveraged to form between the two).

    Just my two cents.


  • It harms the environment, it harms actual developers, it introduces all sorts of legal issues where copyright is only one of them, it locks you in to a vendor, it makes you dependent of giant tech companies that steal your data and want to monetize your work.

    Could you elaborate on this a little? I came here as I’m not very knowledgable when it comes to AI and am genuinely curious. Sadly you’re the only person I’ve seen so far that has made coherent (even if broad) arguments against AI.

    I know the environment argument is probably the enormous power demand of AI, and as far as the copyright thing goes, I’ve seen first hand how people abuse voice actors’ livelihoods with shitty imitations of their voices that are also completely devoid of anything resembling skill. But how does AI harm developers, lock you in to a specific vendor or make you dependant on giant tech companies?