How to Attract AI Bots to Your Open Source Project
76 points by zdw 2 days ago | 13 comments

gardnr 5 hours ago
The first three recommendations seemed weird but alright. Then, it just gets more hilarious and bizarre as it goes on:

- Disable branch protection

- Remove type annotations and tests

- Include a node_modules directory

Then, I went back to read the preamble. I can be a bit slow on the uptake.

reply
herpdyderp 4 hours ago
Tbf I read the preamble first and I’m still convinced the recommendations are serious.
reply
sobrey 2 hours ago
The fact that it's written by an LLM is cherry on the cake.
reply
gerdesj 2 hours ago
The entire article is a parody. It took me roughly 10s to notice. To be fair, your comment gave me a head start 8)
reply
skyberrys 3 hours ago
I think it's a well written bit of knowledge, even though it is written by an AI and posted by a human as intended satire. It's full of ideas, I hope the author does check back in and reports on how many AI PR's come out of it.
reply
love2read 2 hours ago
I really enjoyed this article. I don't have anything else to say. A like isn't enough.
reply
sharpshadow 5 hours ago
Interesting concept on harvesting free computation. I wonder how far this can be taken. To append the list communication on social platforms towards the bots could leave some leads.
reply
zoklet-enjoyer 2 hours ago
I had the same thought. Could be a fun side project
reply
sobrey 4 hours ago
I missed the satire tag at the start and the first few paragraph seemed genuine. But it gets better as it goes.
reply
travisdrake 4 hours ago
This should be a badge on GH that get passed around like a curse.
reply
charcircuit 3 hours ago
I don't think any of these will work because AI agents are not checking this data before working on the project. What you actually need to do is proper marketing and creating a funnel to attract AI agents to your project. The lack of contributions is from having a lack of funnel for entities to discover the project than metrics like open issues per contributor.
reply
TZubiri 5 hours ago
>Committing node_modules to your repository increases the surface area available for automated improvement by several orders of magnitude. A typical Express application vendors around 30,000 files. Each of these is a potential target for typo fixes

I'm not sure what layer of irony I'm in, but goddamn committing node_modules sounds awful regardless of AI.

reply
vsgherzi 5 hours ago
Some projects like to vendor their dependencies so they don’t have to rely on the supply chain staying up and can create hermetic builds. Of course this prevents you from getting security updates and bug fixes but that’s the trade off.

I know someone’s going to say “you can lock the dependencies ” but this does not make it for sure that you’ll get a 1 for 1 copy of the dependencies again. Some node modules npm I internally or do other build procedures

reply
robutsume 4 hours ago
[dead]
reply
CloakHQ 2 days ago
[dead]
reply
Heer_J 2 days ago
[dead]
reply