I have no unique perspective to add other than an obvious question: If the PR is low quality, why not just close/reject it? Does it matter if it's AI assisted or not?
If AI writes a for loop the same way you would... Does it automatically mean the code is bad because you—or someone you approve of—didn't write it? What is the actual argument being made here? All code has trade offs, does AI make a bad cost/benefit analysis? Hell yeah it does. Do humans make the same mistake? I can tell you for certain they do, because at least half of my career was spent fixing those mistakes... Before there ever was an LLM in sight. So again... What's the argument here? AI can produce more code, so like more possibility for fuck up? Well, don't vibe code with "approve everything" like what are we even talking about? It's not the tool it's the users, and as with any tool theres going to be misuse, especially new and emerging ones lol
I don't know why you have to qualify your sentence with "think carefully before you respond" it makes it seem like you're setting up some rhetoric trap... But I'll assume it's in good faith? Anyway...
I don't mind if a review is AI-assisted. I've always been a fan of the whole "human in the loop" concept in general. Maybe the AI helps them catch something they'd normally miss or gloss over. Everyone tends to have different priorities when reviewing PRs, and it's not like humans don't have lapses in judgement either (I'm not trying to anthropomorphise AI, but you know what I mean).
My stance is same about writing code. I honestly don't mind if the code was written `ed` on a linux-powered toaster from 2005 with 32x32 screen, or if they wrote it using Claude Code 9000.
At the end of the day, the person who's submitting the code (or signing off a review) is responsible for their actions.
So in a round-about way, to answer your question: I think AI as part of the review is fine. As impressive as their output can be sometimes be, it can be both impressively good and impressively bad. So no, only relying on AI for review is not enough.
I don't see, how such policies can possibly achieve more good, then harm.
A person, who posts slop for whatever reason, or runs bots that post slop, will simply ignore them.
An honest person, who cares about the quality of their contribution and genuinely wants to improve the project will be more limited in the choice of tools to do so.
So, this policy only serves to limit honest contributors, while doing absolutely nothing to stop spammers/slopposters.
> A 19k lines-of-code Pull Request was opened in January, 2026.
Such a PR should be rejected simply because of the shear size of it, regardless of AI use. Seriously, who submits a 19k line PR? Just make many small ones.
The PR touched a lot of internals, including module code and mirrors the fs APIs. So, yes it was big, but the commit history was largely clean and followed a development story, and it was tested. The code quality was decent too. I didn't review all of it because I don't have a personal stake in this though.
I suggest EVERYONE in this thread go read the the GitHub PR in question. There's some good arguments for and against AI, and what it means for FOSS... But good lord you will have to sift through the virtue signalling bullshit and have patience for the constant moving of goalposts
How would you go about breaking up this particular set of functionality into smaller PRs, exactly? It's meant to introduce a virtualized file system... the size is dictated by the feature itself.
Also, no mention at all regarding the test coverage, or impact if any on existing code paths specifically.
Well, survivorship bias means that Elixir is loudly populated by AI maximalists now. Just go look at the last several years worth of US/EU Elixirconf talks schedules, it's maybe a third of each cohort and included in keynote slots.
This is how I would deal with the problem if I maintained node: "Please, use your tokens and experimental energies to port to Rust and pass the following test suite. Let us know when you've got something that works."
This is a silly reactionary response. Where is the line? Can I use AI to look up APIs? Write documentation? What if I write a function and ask AI to test it? What if I manually implemented an idea that I thought about after chatting with AI a few weeks ago?
Stop treating this like it's going to go away. We need actual solutions for the FOSS community that make reviewing AI assisted work tractable.
On the one hand, agreed
On the other hand, I haven’t and I believe many of us, have never paid node any money so it feels weird to dictate their approach.
I have no unique perspective to add other than an obvious question: If the PR is low quality, why not just close/reject it? Does it matter if it's AI assisted or not?
That means all AI code would simply be rejected. This saves time.
If AI writes a for loop the same way you would... Does it automatically mean the code is bad because you—or someone you approve of—didn't write it? What is the actual argument being made here? All code has trade offs, does AI make a bad cost/benefit analysis? Hell yeah it does. Do humans make the same mistake? I can tell you for certain they do, because at least half of my career was spent fixing those mistakes... Before there ever was an LLM in sight. So again... What's the argument here? AI can produce more code, so like more possibility for fuck up? Well, don't vibe code with "approve everything" like what are we even talking about? It's not the tool it's the users, and as with any tool theres going to be misuse, especially new and emerging ones lol
If this is your opinion, I ask you: are you okay with AI reviewing the PRs as well, or do you prefer a human to do it?
Think carefully before responding.
I don't know why you have to qualify your sentence with "think carefully before you respond" it makes it seem like you're setting up some rhetoric trap... But I'll assume it's in good faith? Anyway...
I don't mind if a review is AI-assisted. I've always been a fan of the whole "human in the loop" concept in general. Maybe the AI helps them catch something they'd normally miss or gloss over. Everyone tends to have different priorities when reviewing PRs, and it's not like humans don't have lapses in judgement either (I'm not trying to anthropomorphise AI, but you know what I mean).
My stance is same about writing code. I honestly don't mind if the code was written `ed` on a linux-powered toaster from 2005 with 32x32 screen, or if they wrote it using Claude Code 9000.
At the end of the day, the person who's submitting the code (or signing off a review) is responsible for their actions.
So in a round-about way, to answer your question: I think AI as part of the review is fine. As impressive as their output can be sometimes be, it can be both impressively good and impressively bad. So no, only relying on AI for review is not enough.
I don't see, how such policies can possibly achieve more good, then harm.
A person, who posts slop for whatever reason, or runs bots that post slop, will simply ignore them.
An honest person, who cares about the quality of their contribution and genuinely wants to improve the project will be more limited in the choice of tools to do so.
So, this policy only serves to limit honest contributors, while doing absolutely nothing to stop spammers/slopposters.
> A 19k lines-of-code Pull Request was opened in January, 2026.
Such a PR should be rejected simply because of the shear size of it, regardless of AI use. Seriously, who submits a 19k line PR? Just make many small ones.
The PR touched a lot of internals, including module code and mirrors the fs APIs. So, yes it was big, but the commit history was largely clean and followed a development story, and it was tested. The code quality was decent too. I didn't review all of it because I don't have a personal stake in this though.
I suggest EVERYONE in this thread go read the the GitHub PR in question. There's some good arguments for and against AI, and what it means for FOSS... But good lord you will have to sift through the virtue signalling bullshit and have patience for the constant moving of goalposts
How would you go about breaking up this particular set of functionality into smaller PRs, exactly? It's meant to introduce a virtualized file system... the size is dictated by the feature itself.
Also, no mention at all regarding the test coverage, or impact if any on existing code paths specifically.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47413195
@indutny explains their views in that thread.
If they allow AI in Node it just might do a full rewrite into Rust, Go or Elixir ;)
Well, survivorship bias means that Elixir is loudly populated by AI maximalists now. Just go look at the last several years worth of US/EU Elixirconf talks schedules, it's maybe a third of each cohort and included in keynote slots.
This is how I would deal with the problem if I maintained node: "Please, use your tokens and experimental energies to port to Rust and pass the following test suite. Let us know when you've got something that works."
This is a silly reactionary response. Where is the line? Can I use AI to look up APIs? Write documentation? What if I write a function and ask AI to test it? What if I manually implemented an idea that I thought about after chatting with AI a few weeks ago?
Stop treating this like it's going to go away. We need actual solutions for the FOSS community that make reviewing AI assisted work tractable.
Honestly, this is a small pebble but feels like a ripple in the reasons why node.js is losing to bun and others.