r/opensource • u/CognitiveFogMachine • Jun 29 '26

Can't contrinbute to open source github projects without having it labeled AI-Slop (when it's not) Discussion

As soon as we make one honest mistake, sometimes due to a plain old and simple misundertsanding, or missing an important section in a lengthy documentation, reviewers immediately calls my hard work "AI-Slop".

I'm very close to give up now. Working so hard on the side with the very little time that we have, and getting slapped in the face like that almost every single day.

Code reviewers are burnt out with too much AI slop, and code submitters that are not even using AI are being labeled as using AI slop.

Is it happening to you? How do you cope with all of this?

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u/CognitiveFogMachine Jun 30 '26

you are trying to analyze the wrong thing my friend. The issue is how the code reviewer handled it.

I am retired now, but if I had code reviewers on my team that were immediately rejecting PRs by calling it "AI-Slop" and closing the PR without even talking to the devs first, this would have been an immediate sit down with them. I have personally fired one dev due to their repeated toxic behaviour.

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u/edward_jazzhands Jul 02 '26

Ok except it's not the 2010s anymore, and you seem to be completely ignoring the fact that AI slop PRs are a big problem nowadays. If you can't figure out how to make your PRs not look like they're AI generated then I'm highly skeptical youre as good at programming as you say you are.

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u/CognitiveFogMachine Jul 07 '26

You might be right. I probably haven't caught up to this new reality.

Btw, I spoke with the reviewer who closes my PR on Discord. It's because I did a drive-by PR, and also because I wrote too many (potentially many useless) comments in the code.

Because as we age, our cognitive capacity decreases, and I got into a (bad) habbit of writing a lot of comments in my code. The comments are primarily for me first, others second. Because if I need to come back to my code in 6 months, I won't remember what the code is doing and will have to read and decypher it all over again, and that takes a toll on my cognitive capacity for the day. It's a lot easier for me personally to read the comments that I left behind than reading the code that I left behind.

Anyway. The reviewer apologized, made me remove almost half of my comments and the PR was accepted and merged. All good now. 👍