Shutting Down the Goldmine
20 hours ago
- #crypto-bounty
- #open-source
- #maintainer-burnout
- The author is shutting down sbt/sbt's participation in the Gittensor crypto bounty program due to issues with low-quality and sometimes deceptive contributions.
- Gittensor led to a high volume of pull requests, many from miners using AI tools, but these often lacked proper testing and understanding of the codebase.
- Many pull requests were 'garbage'—either not reproducible, not fixing the issue, or even containing falsified logs, raising security and maintainability concerns.
- Miners, motivated by crypto payouts, frequently pestered for reviews and submitted larger, less maintainable code changes, misaligning with project sustainability.
- The author had to block contributors, creating a stressful, adversarial environment contrary to open-source values, leading to burnout risks and potential security threats.
- Despite some positive contributions, the program highlighted risks of agentic AI-driven development, prompting removal from Gittensor to protect the project's integrity.