We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag
A GitHub repository faced an influx of spam from AI bots, which disrupted legitimate contributions and conversations. The team implemented measures to combat this issue, including restricting comment and pull request capabilities to prior contributors only. They utilized Git's --author flag to allow legitimate users to gain contributor status while blocking AI-generated spam.
- ▪The repository was overwhelmed by AI bot comments, making it difficult for real contributors to engage.
- ▪The team created an 'AI sheriff' bot to manage spam but found it insufficient.
- ▪They decided to restrict contributions to prior contributors to maintain quality in their open source project.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
2026-04-17Let's talk about AI slopIs it the end of open source we know and love?Written byIldar Iskhakov, CTOThe End of Open Source as We Know It When a few months ago GitHub shared statistics about celebrating an enormous contribution of AI in their product metrics, completely missing the point of degraded contribution quality, we already felt that things were going south. The first worrying moment was the issue we posted with a $900 bounty. We were hoping to motivate someone to contribute and bring shiny new "MCP Apps" support to our platform. We quickly got the attention of legitimate contributors proposing plans, asking questions, submitting attempts — but soon...
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
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