An article yesterday in the register talking about AI spam PRs on GitHub: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/github_kill_switch_pull_requests_ai/
GitHub are apparently looking into whether anything can be done to improve this: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387 The article quotes someone summarizing the problems. I agree with all of these points: - Review trust model is broken: reviewers can no longer assume authors understand or wrote the code they submit. - AI-generated PRs can look structurally "fine" but be logically wrong, unsafe, or interact with systems the reviewer doesn't fully know. - Line-by-line review is still mandatory for shipped code, but does not scale with large AI-assisted or agentic PRs. - Maintainers are uncomfortable approving PRs they don't fully understand, yet AI makes it easy to submit large changes without deep understanding. - Increased cognitive load: reviewers must now evaluate both the code and whether the author understands it. - Review burden is higher than pre-AI, not lower. The article quotes someone saying """ I'm generally happy to help curious people in issues and guide them towards contributions/solutions in the spirit of social coding," he wrote. "But when there is no widespread lack of disclosure of LLM use and increasingly automated use – it basically turns people like myself into unknowing AI prompters. That's insane, and is leading to a huge erosion of social trust. """ That's basically how I feel about the situation although I would go further. Reviewing these PRs is not like being an AI prompter because the human using the AI behaves effectively like a broken AI. You would get better, more trustworthy results much more quickly if you were prompting the AI directly yourself. -- Oscar -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAHVvXxTW%2BAbzhA4UyObFzogTY7EJqrjFEcvVFCy3u_fE-KK8xA%40mail.gmail.com.
