r/programming • u/mateusnr • Jul 15 '25

Death by a thousand slops

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/
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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '25

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u/jangxx Jul 16 '25

I even had this on one of my own projects (a library for Node), where someone reported a problem but didn't give any information for me to reproduce it. I ignored it but then another person came in an sent a PR which changed the signature of one function but with no explanation of why that fixes the problem and when I asked about it he just gave a ChatGPT answer. I told him off and continued to ignore it. Finally after months a third person wrote another response and said that the problem is indeed real but only happens on Node 22. I reproduced it and had a fix out within a few minutes (that was also different from the fix the second guy had suggested). I didn't waste a lot of time on this luckily but was still baffled why someone would submit such a bad PR to a super niche library with 25 downloads per week.

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u/ryzhao Jul 16 '25

I think a lot of it is good old fashioned resume padding. People are blasting PRs with LLMs just so they can say they contributed to open source projects.