Hacktoberfest Rant

This is a submission for the 2025 Hacktoberfest Writing Challenge: Open Source Reflections

Intro

Hacktoberfest exists for devs to get their feet wet with contributing to open source. We hope they find projects they're passionate about that they can contribute to long-term.

The community is welcoming and supportive, while the contributors are well-meaning. From minimal contributions like haikus to solving complex bugs and adding features, all are welcome...but with the advent of LLMs, these good intentions from contributors are becoming harder to notice.

Rant😅

Over the past year, I've seen several cases where people make PRs with little to no effort, from having an agent submit a PR in which it deletes chunks of JSDoc comments in the process of adding a 'feature', to submitting PRs that delete issue-causing code, to writing tests that pass without actually doing anything. Seeing stuff like this has made me chuckle at times, but they can be frustrating as well, and I'd imagine maintainers find them annoying to review.

Now I'm not against AI-assisted coding, far from it; I use it almost every day. What I am against is barely putting any effort just to get a badge or some other 'achievement'.

At the same time, I can understand where this may be coming from. There was a time when I was obsessed with having my GH grid all green, thinking it meant productivity...I mean, some days it was, other days it was just the most mundane, trivial commit just to tick a box, so don't get me wrong, I understand the search for dev achievement.

It's just that when people start contributing to projects without any actual effort, care or context about the project, you're really doing more harm than good to the project and, most importantly, yourself.

The joy of OSS for me has always been in the personal growth you can achieve from working on amazing projects. So don't shortchange yourself.

If you're looking for something complex to do, or something with a lower barrier, or even something in between, there are a ton of projects out there. Don't just pick something with a high number of stars and use Cursor to submit a PR just because you can. It may work out or not (and then you become the butt of a joke 😉), but either way, you've lost a potential growth/learning opportunity.

So take the time to find projects you can care about and make that PR in your own time, hacktoberfest will come and go, but your contribution will always be there...make it a good one.

PS: I haven't submitted a PR in almost two months, I probably should before October ends 😜