Brandolini’s law states that:

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

Which could be adapted to say:

The amount of energy needed to review garbage code is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

Lately, empowered by the recent advances of AI, a new generation of developers is entering the software development field. Fooled by promises of effortless vibe-coding and often with good intentions, they try to make contributions to open source. They do not disclose how they generated their contribution. The contribution seems plausible on the surface, but careful scrutiny highlights the frequent flaws. They don’t bother to check whether the system generated a good solution. That burden falls inevitably on the maintainer. And it’s difficult to reject a contribution; after all, am I 100% sure that it was AI generated? Do I need to spend hours testing to prove that the contribution is flawed?

This makes me want to deny external contributions, work behind closed doors and only allow vetted contributors. Maybe that’s where we’re headed. But I hope not.