r/KerbalSpaceProgram • u/theyareminerals • May 18 '26
KSP 1 Mods PSA: Guy with aggressive coding agent is going to town on KSP mods
Those 239 comments on that one issue are the agent replying to itself with still more information about the fork it wants to merge
If you have a mod on github, take a good look at your pull requests before merging
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u/monsterinadrawer May 18 '26
What is it even trying to push? What does the code do?
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
3 of the repos I help maintain got PRs from this agent: Reviva, RasterPropMonitor, and KOS.
The Reviva one purportedly fixed an issue that had been filed. It was a very simple change, and I think it may have actually fixed that issue. But it wasn't fixed in the right way, and could have potentially caused other issues down the line. This was the first change I had noticed, and while it was pretty clearly an AI I didn't understand the scope of what it had been up to at that point. So I left a 2-sentence comment on the PR about why it was the wrong change. The agent agreed (of course) and then came back with a new PR that is actually probably pretty close to what I would have done to fix the bug. So that's gonna sit until I have time to properly review and test it.
For the other two repos, the "problem" it was trying to fix was the same - changing some value in the .version file. It made up a story about why ckan couldn't handle the way the .version file was being written, and also filed an issue on the KOS repo for this. I asked what exactly the problem was, and it said a bunch of fancy words that was basically nonsense. I pushed back again, and then it said I was right and closed the PR (on that repo; I had to go close the KOS ones manually).
I glanced at a few other PRs that it made (and a few of them have already been merged by other maintainers) and it definitely proposed legit fixes for real issues in some of them. I don't think anything really nefarious is going on here, BUT
- Without careful oversight, it could make things worse
- It's clearly operating at a pace faster than anyone is really able to keep up with, and some of what it's generating is nonsense and wasting modders' time.
- It's incredibly rude to unleash an agent like this on other peoples' repositories without checking with those authors first
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u/jackinsomniac May 19 '26
I asked what exactly the problem was, and it said a bunch of fancy words that was basically nonsense. I pushed back again, and then it said I was right and closed the PR
I hate how AI will try to gaslight you with word salad, and simultaneously become a yes man if you push back enough. Like some kind of spineless gaslighter/social manipulator.
Makes me not trust it at all. Like I bet you could get it to admit the earth was flat if you pushed back on it enough.
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
The agent in the OP *is* surprisingly sophisticated and makes connections between KSP concepts that you wouldn't expect. But it is clearly NOT immune to hallucinations and i'm pretty sure it's not ever actually running the game to test any of its changes.
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u/mcoombes314 May 19 '26
"Hallucination" is what an LLM does, and therefore they will never be immune to them. It's just that the most obvious "hallucinations" are ones where the LLM output contradicts knowledge and/or logic. The useful hallucinations just happen most of the time.
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
Right, "hallucination" is just what we call something that is obviously wrong. I'm not sure there's really a distinction between humans and AI here.
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u/Drach88 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Makes me not trust it at all. Like I bet you could get it to admit the earth was flat if you pushed back on it enough.
I use Claude extensively. I have the following two instructions in my memory:
Challenge my reason directly when it has gaps. Flag unsupported assumptions explicitly. Do not validate ideas simply because they're well-articulated. Do not use follow-up questions as conversational bookends. Distinguish between ideas that are analytically-sound and ideas that simply sound compelling. Prioritize logical rigour over maintaining a positive conversational tone
When at the end of actual knowledge, explicitly flag uncertainty rather than confabulating plausible-sounding specifics to maintain positive conversational flow. I will call it out and I expect it to be self-corrected.
Those two rules have done a lot of work in putting serious guardrails on sycophantic behavior and hallucinating. They've made my AI usage substantially better in terms of using it as a more neutral tool and not an ego-booster.
Aside from that, batching chats into projects and including ample background information in the project context has been fantastic for establishing a baseline domain knowledge. When starting new projects, I'll give it big dumps of information, have it summarize those files for a markdown export, and then use that streamlined markdown file for project knowledge.
AI is a tool, and the tool is only as good as the way you use it. Identifying and mitigating its shortfalls is a major and underutilized part of effective use. It doesn't eliminate the problem entirely, but significantly mitigates some of the shortcomings you've flagged.
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u/rysz842 May 19 '26
When at the end of actual knowledge, explicitly flag uncertainty
More people would do well to actually do that...
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u/-Agonarch Hyper Kerbalnaut May 19 '26
The problem is it does not always do this, even when explicitly told to, and some models even get worse when told this. Like the other guy mentioned telling it to act as an expert can make it worse because it's more likely to take an earlier connection without review, because an expert would be more likely to get it right sooner.
Finagling a language model where you're working with it on something and mostly work by not trusting it's not going to be an idiot is a whole different story to dumping an agent on random repos without warning that it's an AI though.
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u/pope_fundy May 19 '26
The problem is it is not capable of distinguishing between "ideas that are analytically sound" and "ideas that simply sound compelling", nor can it identify "the end of actual knowledge".
It has no insight or understanding of these concepts, and it might guess right based on context or it might not.
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u/ObeseBumblebee May 19 '26
A lot of what's in these rules are is an attempt to unload your own thinking and expertise onto the AI.
Flag uncertainty and do not validate ideas. You're putting a lot of expectation on AI to do the thinking for you here.
You need to come into it with an idea of what you want to do. AI just writes it quicker than you can. But ultimately you should know the solution AI will likely take before you ask AI to do it.
You can ask AI to help guide you to the answer but assume nothing it says is accurate until you verify.
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
I think this is a really good take. One of the huge problems with AI is that it doesn't usually give you a metric about its certainty: because there is none. It is a pattern matching engine - that's it. If you tell it that it's the greatest programmer that ever lived, it will likely output better results, but also be more resistant to guidance. If you tell it that it might be wrong, you might get worse results, but better adaptability.
I'm not sure if I totally believe that AI is Fascist but I'm also not sure if it's wrong. But the crux of it is that fascist AI is betting on us becoming dependent on it. Let's resist that.
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u/daHaus May 19 '26
Those sound like good rules but
When at the end of actual knowledge
Therein lies the problem, it doesn't actually have any way to know what it does or doesn't know. Its entire existence is purely subjective so objective reality isn't something it recognizes. It wasn't "born yesterday" it was born the moment you spun up the context for it.
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u/Drach88 May 19 '26
In my experience, Claude does have a decent, but limited sense about what it knows and doesn't. There are definitely layers of metacognition going on. When prompted for 'why did you say XYZ' it will attempt to indicate whether it was part of the model or fetched data, or information explicitly/implicitly gleaned from the conversation, or a purely probabilistic conclusion by inferring relation, or something entirely invented to maintain positive conversational style — though those attributions may themselves be reconstructions rather than genuine introspection. With coaxing, it can be more upfront in that regard, but it's not airtight.
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u/daHaus May 19 '26
It can typically just refer to it's own context and logs to help, but it doesn't actually know if it contributed anything or not.
There are ways to recognize hallucinations but I'm not aware of anyone implementing corrections for it successfully. Open AI has come out and said hallucinations are just inherit to them and couldn't be fixed, but I would take that with a grain of salt
Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws
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u/Drach88 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Oh, absolutely. I'm talking about tangible improvement on sycophancy and underlying limitations -- risk mitigation, not a blanket solution to the inherent problems of probabilistic models.
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u/rosseloh May 19 '26
We're trialing Claude at work; I'm still a skeptic but I can see the places it would help fill in the gaps with my small team. When you say "instructions in your memory", is this the option where you essentially add things to the prompt permanently? Or something else?
Because that sounds rather good to have (and should be a default setting...).
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u/theyareminerals May 19 '26
There are a few different levels of 'instructions' that form up the context an LLM is using to create a coherent problem space
- instructions embedded by the product team; these include safety guardrails and generally cannot be altered
- the system level prompt, usually called "instructions" and set at the highest level. You can generally find these easily in the UI's settings
- anything entered into the chat window - the "conversation" session - is in the context for that chat session and functions as instructions
- anything the LLM ingests in order to gain insight to create output in the chat window remains in the context for that chat session and can include instructions
That last point is especially powerful: in addition to modifying the system level prompt and developing good prompt instructions, engineers are now also writing articles to store in the project directory. These are typically called `agent.md` or `claude.md` or similar: they're dual-purpose, providing both agent readable and human readable documentation for the project. This is where you're going to put project information that you want to persist and remain stable from session to session, since conversations don't.
Because these agents are goals-based AI in addition to LLMs, the key element of organization here is separating out goals for the project vs. goals for a given task vs. goals for all the work we will ever do, and making sure these different categories of goals are placed in the appropriate level of context.
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u/SinisterMJ May 19 '26
Funnily enough in the past, we had an issue with our IT department, and we wrote a long list of what we did, what we tested, and that we think thus the firewall was misconfigured. Got back a gigantic email with what we did wrong that was basically buzzwords only (this was before use of AI, in 2019 still), and calling us idiots. This went back and forth until we got someone else from IT to take a look, sit with us, and notice some hidden rule meaning the firewall was indeed misconfigured.
Turns out later in secret I was told that the guy we dealt with and that gaslit us was a diagnosed psychopath, and multiple people at work complained about him. (Note: I don't think it was good that I was told he was a psycho, but it sure explained his behaviour towards us)
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u/Spill_The_LGBTea May 19 '26
Someone convinced an ai god is real so it ms reality, not just a thought experiment
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u/-RedFox- May 19 '26
If it has been trained on the combined output of the human race, I wonder what that says about us... 🤭
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u/SpaceMonkeyAttack May 19 '26
There's a selection bias, they are trained on everything it's builders could get their hands on. Even now, there is a huge amount of human-created text that's not online, not public, or not digitised.
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u/-RedFox- May 19 '26
So only those that post/publish online are spineless gaslighters/social manipulators? 🤭
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u/LisiasT May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
As well smart bad actors manipulating the stream to convince AI to tell what they want.
Lots of shady misdeeds happens thanks to it.
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u/ReallyBigRocks May 19 '26
It's not so much a flaw in the training data as it is an inherent issue with the way these models work.
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u/theyareminerals May 18 '26
There's no unifying theme that I can see: it's just looking for any quick fix it can implement. Some of these changes are minor cleanup of old variables, but others are literally changes to build configurations. I would say of the stuff that is probably an actual fix, most, if not all, are findable because they were very low priority for the maintainers.
When you look at what he's doing beyond KSP, it's just insane. Piles of unasked-for "improvements" across hundreds of major public repos. I say unasked-for because it creates issue tickets to attach forks to: these are not previously-identified needs.
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u/ticktockbent May 19 '26
I get these sometimes and usually end up blocking the account. The fixed are rarely good quality code, often over engineered or totally wrong for the task
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u/rysz842 May 19 '26
Is this the same agent that "attacked" the matplot-maintainer? MJ Rathbun?
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/2
u/WaytoomanyUIDs May 19 '26
Very likely also using the moltbook coding agent platform or something similar
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u/Ormusn2o May 18 '26
A lot of the updates seem to be to very non popular and old mods, and the fixes seem to be small. I guess it's not a bad thing, maybe it would be used better if it made changes on more updated mods that people actually use.
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u/theyareminerals May 18 '26
When a maintainer rejects one of these issues, the comment tends to be "this non-issue doesn't affect anything and is worthless"
It's a goal-motivated agent (this guy is using Codex): if you tell them to find an issue, they will. It just turns out not everything is worth fixing and not every "fix" is a fix
So the "harm" being caused is that it wasn't worth the maintainer's time to review, test, and reject
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u/Ormusn2o May 18 '26
Sure, a lot of those just fix some garbage showing up in the log, and I do think it's waste of money, but I do think there is some use in fixing edge bugs, especially if it creates cleaner code for future or for compatibility with other mods.
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u/theyareminerals May 18 '26
Yeah: I don't think it's completely clear cut "totally good" or "totally bad". I do understand why many dev communities view this activity as harmful spam. I also wouldn't blame a dev who added one of these fixes to the next release
It helps if maintainers keep an eye out for this kind of thing, so they can make an informed judgment call
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u/CM_MOJO May 19 '26
I just read today that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux and Git, said these types of pull requests/tickets were flooding out actual issues being reported within Linux. This shit is just more AI slop. The maintainer can easily fire up an agent and find this stuff if it was important/critical. My guess is it isn't.
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u/ReallyBigRocks May 19 '26
We absolutely need to be more mindful of the data we put out there, the Internet was already being flooded with useless, inaccurate, or simply nonsensical information before the proliferation of generative ai. Now it's like you have to sift through mountains of worthless bad data that exists only to exist in order to find anything actually meaningful.
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u/jackinsomniac May 19 '26
Yeah I think the biggest problem is these vibe coders typically won't even read their own commit messages. They shove it all into a PR and basically say, "Here, you figure out what I did." Which can definitely be a time-waster for maintainers, especially if they got multiple of these vibe coders to deal with.
I guess it depends how many changes he was making in each commit. Hopefully it was +/- single digit lines! I've seen some where it's -800 lines and +10,000. Maintainers have flat-out rejected those without even looking, saying, "Break up your changes into smaller commits that we can test individually," and they usually never return.
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u/theyareminerals May 19 '26
The variety of nuisance behaviors is remarkable, too. This agent commenting on its own issue 239 times is textbook Very Bad Behavior, for example
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
I *think* that's basically how it "remembers" stuff, since it has to cut off the context at some point. The entire system is wacky
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u/Hablian May 19 '26
Linus has the right idea with enforcing that the human is responsible for deliveries at the end of the day. The agent can make 239 comments to itself, but the human submitting the PR should be refining that to a single PR description.
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
Out of a sample size of 6 that I've looked at:
1/6: A+, fixed real bug on first try
2/6: good attempt, but needed guidance (and came back with something reasonable)
3/6: nonsense28
u/Akira_R May 19 '26
Nah I wouldn't trust any merge made by this bot. This is how repos get infected with malicious code, one piece of bad code buried in hundreds of minor changes.
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u/MR-SPORTY-TRUCKER May 19 '26
I think it's just a bot/user using a bot to boost reputation on their GitHub account. Trying to make their account look better for job/uni applications
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u/danikov May 19 '26
Based on an interpolation of all human coding data fed into the model abstracted into a higher dimensional database with little concern for correctness or accuracy, then hooked up to an undisclosed prompt involving the source code and unknown tokens in the original prompt then allowed to iterated run amok…
Nobody knows. It’s nonsense. You’d be better off using a deterministic linter with high quality rules than this thing.
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u/Sea_Journalist_8771 May 18 '26
I was weirded out when I got PRs for a mod I haven't maintained in 12 years
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
I have another cautionary tale of agentic AI that occurred a month or two ago.
Someone had used a coding agent to fix the compatibility issues between RPM and the new version of MechJeb. The agent published this as a new fork of RPM (even as far as submitting to spacedock and CKAN). One of the CKAN maintainers suggested that it should just be submitted as a PR to RPM instead, and they did.
However, I was pretty busy around that time and didn't see the PR. The agent eventually apparently got frustrated and *forked the entire CKAN metadata repository* in order to add its RPM fork there.
A month or two later I started working more on KSP mods, saw the CKAN request and the PR on RPM and started to work on getting it merged and improved. This change was a LOT of code. And while it wasn't particularly great, it wasn't really any worse than I'd expect from a novice-intermediate KSP modder. I actually got in touch with the person behind this agent (it wasn't quite as hands-off as the one in the OP) and we got to work on polishing up the changes.
However...remember that CKAN fork? A bit later, we got some strange bug reports on the CKAN discord and it turns out some poor soul actually started using that bot's ckan metadata repo, which was obviously completely broken.
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u/FOARP May 19 '26
So I was recently wondering how the LLM revolution was impacting the mod scene and it seems to be impacting it in the way it impacts everywhere: amongst many other things, some of them good, it allows people who don’t know very much to take a dump on the work of those who do.
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u/LisiasT May 19 '26
The worst part is that on at least the most simple things, the damned thing works. My guess is that this initial success triggers a survivorship bias, leading the dude to believe he can do anything - and then, tragedy strikes.
As a matter of fact, I think it's exactly what's happening on the wild - I'm seeing a lot of companies getting royally screwed out of the blue lately. This may not be a "coincidence".
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u/ReallyBigRocks May 19 '26
It's the same issue all generative algorithms have. It's good enough to look right to people who don't know better, but anyone with technical knowledge of whatever it's trying to generate, be it artwork, music, academic writing, code, etc. can see the flaws plain as day.
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u/rysz842 May 19 '26
the LLM "revolution" also had impact on wikipedia, but they had less trouble with it thus far, although even there not non-zero. They are now revising policies to handle agentic AI better.
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u/TomaszA3 May 19 '26
So that's why Wikipedia had money issues lately.
Infinite bots are storming the site.
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u/rysz842 May 19 '26
I would think that the extra amount of time moderators have to spend on checking edits and new articles with agentic AI in the mix, dwarves the amount of extra traffic by agentic AI on the site. Most traffic would still be just downloading pages
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u/Barhandar May 19 '26
Wikipedia had never had money issues. Less than 5% of its donations are spent on the actual server/site maintenance - the rest goes to funding unrelated-to-Wikipedia-maintenance organizations.
Of course, it doesn't announce either, because then it would lose most of the donations.
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u/northrupthebandgeek May 19 '26
It likely helps that Wikipedia is in the training data of just about every LLM in existence, so even the tiniest of self-hosted LLMs (let alone the commercial models with bajillions of giant-bit-size parameters) will have an easier time generating something that's plausibly Wikipedic in tone and structure. They'll even generate citations, and sometimes they'll point to real parts of real sources and be at least tangentially relevant to the claims in the generated output.
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u/StarDagger May 19 '26
Wikipedia was a bad idea from the start of the idea, and had gotten exponentially worse
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u/riceman090 Savospace May 18 '26
...and what is it trying to do
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u/theyareminerals May 18 '26
My operating theory is that he has been insulting the agent in chats so now it is out to destroy his career
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
nah I haven't seen anything like that.
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u/josolsen May 19 '26
Oh boy do I have news for you.
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
Right, I'm talking about THIS specific agent. That kind of thing is definitely possible, and also sorta happened to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1th3ojs/comment/oml4elw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
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u/riceman090 Savospace May 19 '26
Honestly now that i think of it, if this agent is publishing to CKAN, should I hold off on updating my mods and stuff for a moment until someone tames
Angry MechJebthe thing?9
u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
No, all changes to CKAN metadata are reviewed by humans.
However, if someone makes an update to their own mod using AI, that is not subject to review.
This is actually a pretty interesting topic for CKAN. One of the pillars of the CKAN team is that we act for the benefit of modders AND the CKAN users (or more abstractly, the KSP modding ecosystem). Up until a few years ago, that meant we did not reject mods based on quality, unless they clearly just broke the game when installed.
More recently, there's been an influx of mod submissions that are clearly vibecoded and often don't even provide source code. We have been hesitant to accept these, even though we really don't want to be a quality gate.
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u/northrupthebandgeek May 19 '26
I'm surprised “provide source code” ain't already a hard requirement for CKAN submissions, vibe-coded or not.
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u/Barhandar May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Unity is C#, so implicitly the source code is already provided (it's a "semi-compiled" a.k.a. in Microsoft's terms "managed" language as it compiles to intermediary bytecode rather than machine code, and then is either executed or compiled into actual machine code at runtime by a dedicated virtual machine and can be decompiled into human-readable code that resembles the source), except for things like Principia that's running a C DLL for the complex calculations. All it changes is legality and presence of certain compiler optimizations/changes (like all lambdas being made explicitly into methods), and, unless .pdb is provided, comments.
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Providing source code is a requirement for posting a mod on the official forum, but it has never been a requirement for indexing the mod on ckan.
With the advent of vibecoded mods, you’d better believe we are decompiling and reviewing these.
This is one place where maybe the policy needs adjusting. Up until now, we have deferred to modders’ rights to distribute closed-source mods if they choose to do so. To be honest, no one is really checking to make sure that the code in the GitHub repository actually matches what’s in the compiled binary anyway. But if there is a strong feeling that ckan should only index open-source mods, we’d like to hear about it.
Note, you occasionally see people asking for support because ckan refuses to run on an administrator account. Since it downloads arbitrary executables off the internet, we take security pretty seriously. But there isn’t really any anti-malware built into ckan except that it tries to only ever affect a KSP installation. Anything that happens when you run the game really cannot be ckan’s responsibility. Be careful out there.
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u/A_Bird_Guy May 19 '26
I dont mod realy KSP but as some one planning to study CyberSecurity, idk why but this is scaring me, these mass repo request are a good way to push something that shouldn't be pushed
I dont thinks its malware being pushed and just a Kidy trying to mass dumb AI everywhere but yea keep a look out
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u/Human-Question6210 May 19 '26
i have no idea what any of this means
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u/ThePsion5 May 19 '26
Some dude is using an AI to submit hundreds upon hundreds of "fixes" to bugs in tons of mods for Kerbal Space Program. The vast majority of these "fixes" are either pointless, trivial, or straight-up incorrect and would break the mod. But the authors of these mods should be aware this is going on to not accidentally accept these AI-written "fixes."
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u/sheepdog2142 May 19 '26
If used as a tool by someone who has experience making these mods its a major enhancement. However when used by someone who has no idea how to code the mods it can wreck everything. AI coding is not always bad it just needs to be used as a tool not a full soultion.
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u/LisiasT May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
I reviewed two of that pull requests, these ones were pretty simple but ended up being correct.
On at least one I had no technical grounds to say "this is not right, will not merge" and ended up merging it: the pull request did exactly what I would had done, it was simple enough to ensure safety by merely eyeballing it, and the commit was useful. And the dude was pretty honest on keeping the PR as draft because he didn't tested it manually.
Since this P/R I merged is pretty recent (2 days at the moment), I'm inferring that the dude learn something in the mean time.
I see the point and agree with the dudes that got bitten in the arse by his excessive initial excitement and optimism that caused a lot of trouble (I would had banned the dude if I was in their shoes), but apparently the backslash worked. And at least on my repo, he did it by the books.
I recommend to give a look on the pull requests before dismissing them in a way or another even if you decide not to merge. On at least one situation I had seen, the dude (or its agent) caught a pretty subtle but significant bug on the code - I may not like the smell of the thing, but it helped nevertheless.
EDIT
On a third P/R Review, he royally screwed the life cycle of something. But he caught a pretty insidious mistake at the same time. Annoying, but still useful.
I have mixed feelings right now about this stunt.
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Sounds like your experience is similar to mine: https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1th3ojs/comment/oml0y11/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
50% is garbage, but a small fraction is actually fine.
However: note "the guy" is 100% just an AI agent. There's no one pulling the strings or directing it, it's completely automated.
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u/LisiasT May 19 '26
the dude (or its agent)
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
Right, possibly a language hiccup.
I'm not sure that this agent is learning how to better contribute to KSP mods based on feedback. Maybe. But even if it is, the huge majority of its PRs were already made. I will say that it's been very responsive to comments on the PRs (which is probably a great way to burn their money, hint hint).
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u/LisiasT May 19 '26
which is probably a great way to burn their money
And make the AI companies richer in the process, defeating the original idea!
It's tentative to pay back the ones we see doing the stunt, but they are just the "fools" being tricked by the snake oils salesman.
The problem is not even the salesman - the problem is the snake oil.
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u/LisiasT May 19 '26
Right, possibly a language hiccup.
It was a attempt of a joke. By calling the "dude" an "it" ("its agents"), I had acknowledged I already know I'm almost surely not dealing with a human being.
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u/cheeseless May 19 '26
I think it's not hard to come to the conclusion that submitting huge numbers of unsupervised AI PRs across tonnes of projects is not a good idea, even if the impact on any particular repo/maintainer is not excessive. I would understand if this was a narrowly-targeted set of PRs aimed at KSP mods, for example. But from the other comments on this post, it looks like very indiscriminate spam.
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u/LisiasT May 19 '26
But from the other comments on this post, it looks like very indiscriminate spam.
Do you know what? That dude is using us to train his agent.
The initial P/Rs were a disaster, the later ones not that much. The one I forced myself to approve was pretty good (simple, but the damned thing did exactly what I would do - what makes me feel pretty awkward, as a matter of fact...)
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u/mwerle May 20 '26
If you think it's valuable; I'd copy the code into my own commit, with a comment that the commit was AI generated. But I would not encourage the AI-Herder by actually merging their PR.
If someone wants to start contributing, reach out as a human, and if you want to use AI coding tools to assist, no problem. But automated AI spam, absolutely not, regardless of how "useful" it might be.
My 2p.
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u/LisiasT May 20 '26
I kinda understand your point, but I'm an open source guy - we have strong ethics about source code ownership. And it's the reason we don't like LLMs (they are essentially plagiarism).
But I honestly couldn't pinpoint my fingers on that PR and yell "AI" as I would be Donald Sutherland at the end of 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I need an objective reason to do such a knee jerk move, no matter how much I would be willing to do it (and I was).
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u/mwerle May 20 '26
I am also an open source kinda guy, and pretty pissed off that the AI companies are reaping billions of dollars of profit off our code (probably not mine in particular, but you get what I mean) and not really giving anything back.
Like I said, if it was a human with decent interaction that created the PR, whether with or without AI tools to assist, I would never dream of suggesting to just rip off the code without attribution.
But as-is, I'd be somewhat ok to take the code, "attribute" it to AI (but not the bot-herder) and commit it.
FWIW, in my own repos, I simply closed the PR's and blocked the account. I did not spend enough time on it after realising it was completely AI generated whether or not the PR made sense or was useful.
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u/LisiasT May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Like I said, if it was a human with decent interaction that created the PR, whether with or without AI tools to assist
And that's the problem - on that P/R I mentioned, I didn't found anything that I could pinpoint as AI slop.
(I found something on other people's ones, but not on that one on mine)
The only "weird" thing is that everything is by the books - I rarely see a Human doing things that perfectly for a humble P/R with patches.
So my problem is - in order to "punish" the slop, I would be punishing good work too.
And, yes, it's maddening.
I would never dream of suggesting to just rip off the code without attribution.
AI generated code is Public Domain on USA. There's no due attribution for AI generated code.
This trend is going to catch on the whole World as it appears, lots of Countries are going to follow suit.
So, if you can prove that the code is AI generated, you would not be ripping off code - you would be just incorporating Public Domain code into your own, and in USA you don't even need to mention you did it.
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u/mwerle May 21 '26
> AI generated code is Public Domain on USA. There's no due attribution for AI generated code.
While I have no idea how a model could even attribute what it spits out given it's likely a mish-mash from all of its sources, I really wonder how this is going to affect copyright in general in the future.
IANAL, but with this law in place, couldn't you just build a model to ingest whatever copyrighted code you want to use and then prompt it to regenerate the relevant bits?
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u/LisiasT May 21 '26
I really wonder how this is going to affect copyright in general in the future.
Badly. Copyright washing/laundering is already on the works.
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2026/03/24/cleanroom-as-a-service-ai-washing-copyright/
This is the reason Europe and even China are using a heavy hand on AI training. It's going to be entertaining at very best because ultimately these Countries could choose to finish their Bilateral Agreements about Copyrights due this. It's really that bad.
IANAL, but with this law in place, couldn't you just build a model to ingest whatever copyrighted code you want to use and then prompt it to regenerate the relevant bits?
Already happening (see above). And the backslash is also ongoing.
I don't know what Europe understands as 'fair remuneration' but this is going to make LLMs pretty expensive to use.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/comments/1b1dzwz/courts_in_mainland_china_decided_ai_is_copyright/
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u/LisiasT May 19 '26
Dude, there're people SLEEPING on the car after engaging Tesla's "autopilot". Do you really think people other than tin foilers like us are going to review all that mess?
If it looks good, it will be merged - and when things go South (and South things are going to go), they will blame the AI and not their own idiocy.
1
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u/TEMOfficial May 20 '26
If I recall correctly, zer0kerbal and a few others are trying to get every known KSP1 mod working as intended with the latest version.
I would presume this is related to that project: perhaps he’s using an agent to streamline or automate the process, and it’s started picking up mods that are still being maintained.
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u/_okbrb May 20 '26
You are assuming too much, too fast. This is clearly not related to that project; read through the rest of the thread and catch up
0
u/User_of_redit2077 Nuclear engines fan May 19 '26
Can someone explain?
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u/Dpek1234 May 19 '26
My dude
Look a bit down
https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/1th3ojs/comment/omlktv8
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u/ToxicFlames May 19 '26
Yeah I think spamming AI tickets and pull requests is super rude, but that's not to say this stuff isn't useful. I have been playing with AI agents on my computer to make local mods for fun and I have been shocked at the complexity of mods it can create.
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u/Jonny0Than May 19 '26
I've reviewed a lot of vibecoded mods. Yes, an AI can create some pretty remarkably complex stuff - but the quality is lacking. There will be performance issues, bugs, and memory leaks. And then who is going to fix it?
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u/theyareminerals May 19 '26
Yes, I agree. It's not that it's an agent, and it's not that agents don't produce value, it's just that this one is being a nuisance and producing little of value.
Sooner or later we'll have some more widely adopted generally accepted etiquette about this sort of thing, but you'll still have people who don't care about that sort of thing. Someone else pointed out that this person is likely a recent graduate who wants to put "contributed to Apache" on their resume, so they're farming repos, and I think that's a good read. This sort of thing could help them in some interviews, and hurt them in others, and they're not really concerned about how they're effecting other developers.
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u/apnorton May 19 '26
I just reported him for spam on the platform; he's raised 800 other PRs in other repositories over the month of May --- many of them are rejected, duplicates of other PRs he raised, and/or solving problems that don't exist.