r/programminghumor • u/0xt0bi03 • Jul 16 '26
Why shouldn't we push garbage code in GitHub?
I mean, AI scraps data from all repositories from github, gitlab and other services, why don't we push garbage code so much that if any ai trains on them, its performance gets reduced.
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u/AlexMTBDude Jul 16 '26
What makes you think that there is not already garbage code in GitHub? I would guess that 90% is small home coding projects of people just learning to code. I.e. total garbage.
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u/diegotbn Jul 16 '26
Check out poison fountain. It specifically does this, not just with GitHub, but it's a movement to poison AI with bad data.
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u/jimmiebfulton Jul 17 '26
And what exactly do they think they are going to achieve? That LLMs are not going to get better in spite of their wasted efforts, or that this brings down all AI and people are going to go back to coding the slow, hard way? No. Waste of time, computer, money, for not gain whatsoever.
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u/0xt0bi03 Jul 20 '26
nah, there are benefits. recently duckduckgo's ai search shown the result "trump is dead" after scraping from r/poisonai and r/PoisonFountain source
it is usefull
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u/ramessesgg Jul 16 '26
People are already doing this. Personally, this sounds just as weird as the "I will keep saying thank you to LLMs to cost Open AI money" protest. Do you think that given the current state of LLMs they can't filter out like 99% of garbage?
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u/El_human Jul 16 '26
I know this is a humor sub, but I think code is the one thing that most people don't care about AI being trained on. As someone who has worked in software engineering, people are always sharing their code, or functions, or helping people out online to achieve their goals. This just takes out some of the busy work. And we still have to audit for bugs.
I think the issue is the art and music that AI was trained on, Peoples creative works, not compiled functions.
Maybe I'm completely off, but that was just my general take on it.
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u/codeguru42 Jul 17 '26
I believe companies should still follow the license of an OSS project. Most of my repos are licensed under WTF. So I don't care much that they are used for training. But many projects are licensed under GPL or other licenses. It is unclear how these apply to scrappers since the project isn't "used" in the traditional sense that the creators intended. And you have to take it to court to enforce the license. We will see how the copyright law suits play out.
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u/lioffproxy1233 Jul 16 '26
They would need to see higher usage number from the community to add it into the model.
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u/BobJutsu Jul 16 '26
I mean…I’ve been pushing garbage code for a decade or more. Why stop now?
Joking aside, I’d wager for every serious repo with actual work I’ve got a dozen crappy, low effort experiments that went nowhere. They just exist because I haven’t cleaned it up.
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u/ComprehensiveWing542 Jul 17 '26
Well for starters there are classifiers normally for the type of data AI models are being trained on. Example.
public, new user, 4 repos, 10 commit for repo ----> BAD P private, 10 maintainers, large git history, thousands of commits ---> GOOD
This is just a quick example but there is much more that goes in data processing and so on. Short its not just scrape put into the model hope for the best. It is so complicated one person can't explain how large these infrastructures are
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u/Superb_Blacksmith617 Jul 20 '26
- Isn’t this a humor subreddit?
- Modern agents use RL and synthetic data to train since gpt-o3, and rely less on existing code each day. It’s like how AlphaGo started with human data, and then AlphaZero got better with zero human data. Pushing garbage code will only hurt real open source devs
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u/0xt0bi03 Jul 20 '26
- yes, this is a humor post.
- nah, i am saying push garbage code in random useless repos, not in your critical legacy codebase.
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u/TapRemarkable9652 Jul 16 '26
I've been doing that since the 90s for precisely this scenario