Per
@Wahidkhan7852
i need to talk about GirlScript Summer of Code / GSSoC 2026. Yes, this is a long rant.
this program has 43,000 participants. it markets itself as india's largest open source initiative. it has sponsor logos, swag, certificates, badges, the whole production. and underneath all of that it is one of the most embarrassing displays of fake engineering culture i have ever seen in my life. let me explain what happens inside GSSoC for anyone who hasn't been unfortunate enough to witness it.
contributors don't come to learn. they come to farm. it's a race to comment "pls assign" or abuse GitHub Actions to "/assign" them every issue in every repo before reading a single line of the codebase. then the PRs are ChatGPT output, pasted wholesale, not tested, not read, not understood. sometimes they don't even remove the AI explanation text at the top. just raw model output submitted.
project admins are not better. some of them registered their own projects, label every issue as "level:critical" and "type:security" because the scoring config rewards that with 150 points per PR instead of 70. merge your friends' garbage PRs. collect project admin points for every merge. collect contributor points from other repos where your friends are admins.
mentors signed up for the badge, got their linkedin title, and disappeared. the contributors they were supposed to guide have never received a single review comment from them.
and GSSoC? GSSoC responded to all of this by creating a gssoc:ai-slop label. a literal hardcoded label in their scoring infrastructure to filter out AI generated garbage. they also did a quiet leaderboard reset in may after "community reports" and moved on like nothing happened.
i pulled their live API. #1 has 54,917 points. minimum 50 points per merged PR. that's 1,100 merged pull requests in 5-6 weeks. 31 PRs a day. every day. #2 has 50,548. #3 has 47,446. #5 has a contributor score of 19,492 AND a project admin score of 20,815 from his own registered project. And this is after the cleanup. this is the sanitized version.
the worst part isn't even the farming. it's that everyone lets it happen. the program org lets it happen. the project admins let it happen. the companies sponsoring this let it happen. and thousands of students walk away with a certificate that says they contributed to open source when what they actually did was learn how to game a points formula. real contributors, the ones actually reading code, actually fixing things, actually learning something, are getting buried. their PRs sit in review while the repo owner is busy merging 30 AI PRs from their college friends.
i'm inside this program and i'm genuinely angry that something with this much reach and potential decided that engagement metrics matter more than anyone learning anything. Open Source is not a point system. it never was.
link to the leaderboard:
gssoc.girlscript.org/leaderb…