Please stop flooding our projects with AI slop to furnish your CV

Open-source contributions have become a kind of currency, and GitHub amplifies this by showing contributor avatars, activity feeds, and per-day contribution graphs. Recruiters and hiring managers often use these signals to screen candidates, so developers have an incentive to tune them. The author, a maintainer, notes a shift in the last year: external contributions now arrive more often as pull requests than issues, issues often come with AI-generated analysis, and security vulnerability reports increasingly include AI-generated fix proposals. The author suspects many of these are driven by people using LLMs like Claude to find projects, identify problems, and auto-generate PRs to create the illusion of genuine engagement.

As a concrete example, a contributor with virtually no GitHub activity since late 2018 and no prior engagement with the project submitted three separate PRs fixing spelling and grammar mistakes in comments. Claude apparently made the fixes, wrote the PR descriptions, signed off the commits on behalf of the user, and even inserted its own co-authorship into commit message trailers. The changes were harmless and correct, but the author saw them as busywork meant to farm contribution metrics rather than add value. The author closed all three PRs without comment, explaining they don't want to encourage people to waste maintainers' time on this kind of AI-generated noise.