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AI/LLM Usage Becoming A "Denial of Service Attack" On Open-Source Project Maintainers
(www.phoronix.com)
If AI actually worked, it would filter the bullshit for them.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2026
244 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
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Love articles that just summarize a blog or social media post while adding absolutely nothing.
This time I actively want to be left behind.
But I was told AI is actually great for open source now and accepted with open arms...! /s
If you know what you're doing, AI can be a very useful tool. However, a lot of people have no clue what they're doing and they use AI to amplify their incompetence.
I haven't met a single AI user who doesn't claim (s)he uses it in a smart way.
Maybe one day someone can actually prove the mythical usefulness of AI beyond software devs who think they're 19% faster but are actually 10% slower.
That study was redone and the results were less conclusive the second time around
They were less conclusive because they couldn't find participants. Probably because they paid a third of what the previous study did.
Yes. They could definitely fund studies to do so! They have the money! Hmm.
Some of the AI generated bug reports we get are good because the author had verified them, added a test case and at least reviewed if it is guest trigger able. Yesterday's flood however was low effort spam.
"Becoming"? It has been for months now.
About a year or two. Holy shit.
In my experience, the users behind this tend to be a state of AI Psychosis.
They're the kind of user who forked or started some giant project, with a wall of text and emojiis and tables in the readme, yet theres no concrete information on how well it actually works. They submit some gigantic PR that touches a ton of files... for a feature that already exists in the project, and they apparently werent aware of.
And this is another tell. This is not some rogue agent like people think, its some person deep down a rabbit hole that might think they're contributing to QEMU. They arent necessarily malicious; just a bit crazy.
Malicious versions do exist, but thats usually motivated by grifters trying to pad their resume with contributions. Theyd do that on GitHub, not Gitlab.
Becoming?
Ddosing is illegal. Sure, US won't care, but you could try it in the EU.
Does this actually meet the legal criteria for DDoS though?