IMO: trust-based systems only work if they carry risk. Your own score should be linked to the people you "vouch for" or "denounce".

This is similar to real life: if you vouch for someone (in business for example), and they scam them, your own reputation suffers. So vouching carries risk. Similarly, if you going around someone is unreliable, but people find out they actually aren't, your reputation also suffers. If vouching or denouncing become free, it will become too easy to weaponize.

Then again, if this is the case, why would you risk your own reputation to vouch for anyone anyway.

"Open source has always worked on a system of trust and verify"

Not sure about the trust part. Ideally, you can evaluate the change on its own.

In my experience, I immediately know whether I want to close or merge a PR within a few seconds, and the hard part is writing the response to close it such that they don't come back again with the same stuff.

(I review a lot of PRs for openpilot - https://github.com/commaai/openpilot)

Doesn't this just shift the same hard problem from code to people? It may seem easier to assess the "quality" of a person, but I think there are all sorts of complex social dynamics at play, plus far more change over time. Leave it to us nerds to try and solve a human problem with a technical solution...

Prior art? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato

Reminds me fondly of advogato.

How does a potential positive contributor pierce through? If they are not contributing to something already and are not in the network with other contributors? They might be a SME on the subject and legit have something to bring to the table but only operated on private source.

I get that AI is creating a ton of toil to maintainers but this is not the solution.

this wouldn't have helped against the xz attack

Initially I liked the idea, but the more I think about it the more this feels like it just boils down to: only allow contributions from a list of trusted people.

I think denouncing is an incredibly bad idea especially as the foundation of VOUCH seems to be web of trust.

If you get denounced on a popular repo and everyone "inherits" that repo as a source of trust (e.g. think email providers - Google decides you are bad, good luck).

Couple with the fact that usually new contributors take some time to find their feet.

I've only been at this game (SWE) for ~10 years so not a long time. But I can tell you my first few contributions were clumsy and perhaps would have earned my a denouncement.

I'm not sure if I would have contributed to the AWS SDK, Sendgrid, Nunit, New Relic (easily my best experience) and my attempted contribution to Npgsql (easily my worst experience) would have definitely earned me a denouncement.

Concept is good, but I would omit the concept of denouncement entirely.

Not sure about this one. I understand the need and the idea behind it is well-intentioned, but I can easily see denouncelists turn into a weapon against wrongthinkers. Said something double-plus-ungood on Twitter? Denounced. Accepted contribution from someone on a prominent denouncelist? Denouced. Not that it was not possible to create such lists before, but it was all informal.

The real problem are reputation-farmers. They open hundreds of low-effort PRs on GitHub in the hope that some of them get merged. This will increase the reputation of their accounts, which they hope will help them stand out when applying for a job. So the solution would be for GitHub to implement a system to punish bad PRs. Here is my idea:

- The owner of a repo can close a PR either neutrally (e.g. an earnest but misguided effort was made), positively (a valuable contribution was made) or negatively (worthless slop)

- Depending on how the PR was closed the reputation rises or drops

- Reputation can only be raised or lowered when interacting with another repo

The last point should prevent brigading, I have to make contact with someone before he can judge me, and he can only judge me once per interaction. People could still farm reputation by making lots of quality PRs, but that's actually a good thing. The only bad way I can see this being gamed is if a bunch of buddies get together and merge each other's garbage PRs, but people can already do that sort of thing. Maybe the reputation should not be a total sum, but per project? Anyway, the idea is for there to be some negative consequences for people opening junk PRs.

Are we seeing forum moderations (e.g., Discourse trust levels^[1]) coming to source code repositories?

[1]: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...

I think LLMs are accelerating us toward a Dune-like universe, where humans come before AI.

Hope github can natively integrate something in the platform, a relevant discussion I saw on official forums: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387

Fediverse link: https://fosstodon.org/@mitchellh@hachyderm.io/11603152931120...

Love seeing some nushell usage!

So you're screwed if you don't have any connections. In that way it's just like meat space.

I have a hard time trying to poke holes in this. Seems objectively good and like it, or some very similar version of it, will work long term.

Reminds me of the reputation system that the ITA in Anathem by Neal Stephenson seem to have. One character (Sammann) needs access to essentially a private BBS and has to get validated.

“After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little while for my request to be considered. The people who control these were probably searching the Reticulum to obtain corroboration for my story.”

“How would that work?” I asked.

Sammann was not happy that I’d inquired. Maybe he was tired of explaining such things to me; or maybe he still wished to preserve a little bit of respect for the Discipline that we had so flagrantly been violating. “Let’s suppose there’s a speelycaptor at the mess hall in that hellhole town where we bought snow tires.”

“Norslof,” I said.

“Whatever. This speelycaptor is there as a security measure. It sees us walking to the till to pay for our terrible food. That information goes on some reticule or other. Someone who studies the images can see that I was there on such-and-such a date with three other people. Then they can use other such techniques to figure out who those people are. One turns out to be Fraa Erasmas from Saunt Edhar. Thus the story I’m telling is corroborated.”

“Okay, but how—”

“Never mind.” Then, as if he’d grown weary of using that phrase, he caught himself short, closed his eyes for a moment, and tried again. “If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.”

“Asamocra?”

“Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction. Don’t even bother trying to parse that. The acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn’t been a true asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass—never mind—and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation. The point being, I was not granted the access I wanted until recently.” He smiled and a hunk of ice fell off his whiskers and landed on the control panel of his jeejah. “I was going to say ‘until today’ but this damned day never ends.”

“Fine. I don’t really understand anything you said but maybe we can save that for later.”

“That would be good. The point is that I was trying to get information about that rocket launch you glimpsed on the speely.”*

The return of the Web of Trust, I suppose. Interesting that if you look at the way Linux is developed (people have trees that they try to get into the inner circle maintainers who then submit their stuff to Linus's tree) vs. this, it's sort of like path compression in a union-find data structure. Rather than validating a specific piece of code, you validate the person themselves.

Another thing that is amusing is that Sam Altman invented this whole human validation device (Worldcoin) but it can't actually serve a useful purpose here because it's not enough to say you are who you are. You need someone to say you're a worthwhile person to listen to.

Isn't it extremely difficult problem? It's very easy to game, vouch 1 entity that will invite lots of bad actors

The Web of Trust failed for PGP 30 years ago. Why will it work here?

For a single organisation, a list of vouched users sounds great. GitHub permissions already support this.

My concern is with the "web" part. Once you have orgs trusting the vouch lists of other orgs, you end up with the classic problems of decentralised trust:

1. The level of trust is only as high as the lax-est person in your network 2. Nobody is particularly interested in vetting new users 3. Updating trust rarely happens

There _is_ a problem with AI Slop overrunning public repositories. But WoT has failed once, we don't need to try it again.

I could see this becoming useful to denounce contributors. "This user is malicious, a troll, contributes LLM slop, etc." It could become a distributed block list, discourage some bad behavior I've been seeing on GitHub, assuming the denounce entries are reviewed rather than automatically accepted.

But using this to vouch for others as a way to indicate trust is going to be dangerous. Accounts can be compromised, people make mistakes, and different people have different levels of trust.

I'd like to see more attention placed in verifying released content. That verification should be a combination of code scans for vulnerabilities, detection of a change in capabilities, are reproducible builds of the generated artifacts. That would not only detect bad contributions, but also bad maintainers.

An interesting approach to the worsening signal-to-noise ratio OSS projects are experiencing.

However, it's not hard to envision a future where the exact opposite will be occur: a few key AI tools/models will become specialized and better at coding/testing in various platforms than humans and they will ignore or de-prioritize our input.

I think this project is motivated by the same concern I have that open source (particularly on GitHub) is going to devolve into a slop fest as the barrier of entry lowers due to LLMs. For every principled developer who takes personal responsibility for what they ship, regardless of whether it was LLM-generated, there are people 10 others that don't care and will pollute the public domain with broken, low quality projects. In other words, I foresee open source devolving from a high trust society to a low one.

Why isn't the link directly to the github repository[1]?

[1]: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

> Who and how someone is vouched or denounced is left entirely up to the project integrating the system.

Feels like making a messaging app but "how messages are delivered and to whom is left to the user to implement".

I think "who and how someone is vouched" is like 99.99% of the problem and they haven't tried to solve it so it's hard to see how much value there is here. (And tbh I doubt you really can solve this problem in a way that doesn't suck.)

Makes sense, it feels like this just codifies a lot of implicit standards wrt OSS contribution which is great to see. I do wonder if we'll ever see a tangible "reputation" metric used for contribs, or if it'd even be useful at all. Seems like the core tension now is just the ease of pumping out slop vs the responsibility of ownership of code/consideration for project maintainers.

Does is overlap with Contributor License Agreement?

Easy for the koreans to game this.

Fortunately, as long as software is open sourced, forking will remain a viable way to escape overzealous gatekeeping.

Is this the return of Advogato?

We got social credit on GitHub before GTA 6.

Another way to solve this is how Linux organizes. Tree structure where lower branches vet patches and forward them up when ready

Illegal in europe. You are bot allowed to keep a black list of people with the exception of some criminal situations or addiction.

This makes sense for large-scale and widely used projects such as Ghostty.

It also addresses the issue in tolerating unchecked or seemingly plausible slop PRs from outside contributors from ever getting merged in easily. By default, they are all untrusted.

Now this social issue has been made worse by vibe-coded PRs; and untrusted outside contributors should instead earn their access to be 'vouched' by the core maintainers rather than them allowing a wild west of slop PRs.

A great deal.

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However good (or bad) this idea may be, you are shooting yourself in the foot by announcing it on Twitter. Half the devs I know won’t touch that site with a ten foot pole.

Who trusts people who still use X?