Someone made a 128k line PR to OpenCut
83 comments
·July 29, 2025fn-mote
The discussion here is amusing to read, but this is obviously a submission to instant-reject. No need for waste your time reading the PR, and I’m sure the maintainer won’t.
This is like spam making the front page of HN. Why?
cloudbonsai
I actually checked the PR because I was curious if a cutting-edge AI can generate 128k lines of quality code. I mean, if that's true it's great!
Here is what I noticed while reading the PR:
- The PR has surpurisingly little meat. It contains 128k lines, but most of them are AI-generated documentation (86K lines, 68%). It also contains 9K lines of AI-generated tests (7%). So the actual code is just 32K lines (25%).
- For what it's worth mentioning, the documentation is bad. It mostly feels like a copy-and-paste from someone's LLM session. You can check it out yourself: https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/b883256/docs/iss...
- I have no deep understanding of OpenCut project, but the code seems buggy? I observe that it casually removes a few logics from the original code without any reason. So it's plausible that the PR is not only useless but harmful to merge.
So my takeaway is that a latest commercial LLM is not getting there, at least yet.
potato3732842
>- The PR has surprisingly little meat. It contains 128k lines, but most of them are AI-generated documentation (86K lines, 68%). It also contains 9K lines of AI-generated tests (7%). So the actual code is just 32K lines (25%).
When you hear about a huge PR or change this should be your default assumption regardless of whether AI or otherwise.
Most huge PRs are only a few thousand lines of "serious logic" code. That code then spawns a bunch of duplication of logic, stuff like adding a dozen few thousand line handling routines to convert a dozen inputs into some single thing. Those then spawn several times their own line count in docs and tests and whatnot.
phendrenad2
Great, so now the old "add 30k lines of auto-generated selenium tests to a project and put it on your resume" has a new AI step that amplifies it to 130k lines.
brookst
It’s got something for everyone.
1. Outrage is fun! 2. “This confirms my biases!” 3. It’s kind of a funny extreme of bad behavior we’ve all had to deal with
bbor
It's interesting and funny and indicative of a broader problem in open-source development, reaching not only technical projects but also stuff like Wikipedia. 90% of the reason I'm here is for the discussion, not literally for the links to news -- there's much better ways to curate news directly to my phone these days.
Plus, again: it's just downright funny. It starts funny b/c he's clearly well-meaning ("I do not think this can be directly merged into the project"), and then you get to the part where there's 300+ commits (20 of which are just "Updated project files") and you just can't help but crack a little smile!
morkalork
It's novel spam? At least today it is, tomorrow probably not. 128k is impressive!
bwfan123
Because we need to celebrate BullShit at scale ! and celebrate the fearless data-scientists turned software engineers who aided by AI are setting PR records while we software engineers watch with envy and sarcasm.
soraminazuki
This shouldn't be flagged. This is a new type of spam that will have serious consequences for open source.
LLMs have made it possible to effortlessly produce plausible looking garbage at scale and open source maintainers will soon have to deal with a high volume of these PRs going forward.
Just look at how much spammers it attracted when Digital Ocean offered free T-shirts to open source contributors [1]. Now, imagine what will happen when job prospects are involved and anyone can mass produce plausible looking garbage PRs in one single click.
LLMs will accelerate maintainer burnouts in the open source world and there's no good solution for that right now.
aydyn
There is actually a really simple solution to this: auto reject PRs from people you dont know.
If someone is new to the project, ask them to write an issue explaining the bug/feature and how they plan to address/implement it. Make them demonstrate a human understanding of the code first.
This is not a purely technical problem but a social one too.
soraminazuki
Making people go through hoops will just discourage legitimate potential contributors and not stop AI slop. LLMs are good at generating legitimate sounding wall of text. Without actual code, it'll be harder to distinguish legitimate contributors from spammers.
bee_rider
I wonder, based on the start of the thread:
> I do not think this can be directly merged into the project. I think it requires some manual reviewing if something (I mean some part of code) is useful for the project development.
It seems like maybe his idea was to make a bunch of code, and then see if the maintainers want to pluck anything out of it. This is, of course, not how things are done and not very helpful. Projects don’t need a bunch of AI generated brainstorming. But, I guess, at least it seems well-intentioned? Over-enthusiastic.
thih9
My guess is they wanted to share some ideas; as in: what features could be added and what would an example implementation look like. They have no interest in deeper discussions or in forking the project.
To me a large PR with a disclaimer that it should not be merged seems a decent way of doing this and better than not sharing anything at all.
But I see how this could get distracting if more people do this. I assume this is a one time thing. In future I would recommend creating some fork with a note that it is not going to be maintained.
bee_rider
It just seems overwhelming and, therefore, very unlikely to get any traction. But I guess we’ll see.
em3rgent0rdr
Better if the submitter opened a feature request clearly describing the feature. As part of such a request, they could provide some screenshots and maybe a link to their AI-slop generated code for anyone curious to demo as a proof-of-concept, but without burdening any human with having to look at the slop.
blitzar
Low signal, high noise. Why waste time looking for the needle in the haystack?
delecti
The fact that this wasn't immediately rejected with a stern "GTFO" tells me the project maintainers have way more patience than me.
gpm
I don't see any evidence that a maintainer has responded? It looks like all the responses are by
- Some bot the maintainers are using to do preliminary code review
- Trolls saying "lgtm" and the like.
kelseyfrog
> A .claude/settings.local.json
We'll at least it's easy to find the root cause of the problem :/
tyre
I don’t think that’s the root cause here. The submitter decided that a 128k line PR was a good thing.
AI is a tool. The problem is software engineering best practices (small, reviewable, incremental self-contained PRs.)
rurban
No, he did not. He said it was bad thing. He presented a couple of new features for discussion, with a new electron target. He decided to split it up into individual PR's after positive feedback.
hsbauauvhabzb
The problem is I can automatically ban tabs if I don’t like them. I Can limit the number of characters per line with a script. I cannot prevent you from sending prs with AI slop, nor can I easily detect it
Aeolun
You can make a bot that auto rejects everything over 5k lines though
cr125rider
Ah if you can’t easily detect it, wouldn’t that mean it passes muster?
johnisgood
It depends. Could you easily determine in this case that it was "AI slop"? I have used LLMs before for PRs, but not with having my brain turned off, and it got merged because it was legitimate, and I would have never sent the PR without doing my own careful review. I may be in the minority, who knows.
lokar
[flagged]
Ancalagon
How much do we think was spent on claude code for this?
Arrowmaster
He's still going. Just saw a new commit using Claude to add .vscode to .gitignore and untrack the files. How much did it just cost to do something that can be done in two cli commands.
null
cadamsdotcom
This is a fork.
We are going to have to learn some new etiquette with this new tech, but that’s always how it’s been.
dgfitz
I appreciate your point and your candor, however forking is not new tech. This 'etiquette' is not at all new.
cadamsdotcom
I’m talking about a form of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September - new people to open source learning what’s polite. This person just happened to do it in the open!
a2128
I had a pull request like this on my project somewhat recently, thousands of files changed, the author seemed unsure of what exactly they added, and names suggested use of AI tools.
I think it's a cool use case for AI, for non-programmers to be able to customize open source software for themselves with AI tools (just hope it doesn't introduce a data loss bug or security vulnerability...) But obviously these tools as of today will make an absolute mess over time without a lot of guidance, and being a non-programmer makes it impossible to give it that guidance. I guess it's fine if the only user is the non-programmer and they're never gonna maintain it themselves, but sometimes they assume some of the code somewhere will somehow be useful for the project and so they open a pull request like this without realizing the insanity they're doing
mat_b
The attitude of "I will do only the fun part. I'll create some barely workable code and expect others to fix it" existed long before AI code generation. Vibe coding is really enabling it to be taken to another level.
soraminazuki
> The attitude of "I will do only the fun part.
It would've been better if the PR author actually had any fun thing they wanted to do. They didn't, hence the PR title "Try to help but need some help." This PR literally has no purpose.
RGBCube
Holy slop.
This does reflect my experience with Claude Code too. It just writes TOO MUCH damn code. It's never able to understand the tiny change that would make the software actually be better without guidance, and at that point I'd rather write it myself.
It's fine for gruntwork though.
blitzar
It was trained on the code the finest leet coders wrote. I do wish it would look at my existing code base and write more shit code like I write.
Ancalagon
my experience as well - it would rather re-invent the wheel over and over
tough
their owners charge per token so...
kirb
On the Pro tier, it’s a fixed monthly price with fixed quota per 5 hour window.
That said, every time I’ve tried it, it’s spent ages writing code that barely works, where it keeps writing over-engineered workarounds to obvious errors. Eventually, it gives up and decides broken is good enough, and returns to the prompt. So you still have a point…
koakuma-chan
Looks like it's mostly tests and AI specs.
azemetre
It all amounts to chargeable tokens in the end.
koakuma-chan
Anthropic offers a flat fee subscription.
brookst
Conspiracy theories need to at least have a passing compatibility with reality. Anthropic loses money with more tokens used to solve the same problem.
mgerdts
Coderabbit’s estimate of review time is interesting:
Estimated code review effort
5 (Critical) | ~90 minutes
teaearlgraycold
Does anyone else feel like Coderabbit is mostly noise?
This is a perfect example of a PR that makes GitHub's react client run like shit.
Click on the Files changed tab and start scrolling if you want to see for yourself. It wasn't always this way. There was a time when you could review PRs containing 500+ modified files without any jank.