Ask HN: Is answering GitHub issues with AI without declaring it a big deal?
A user on Hacker News expressed concern about the Mindwtr app's use of automated AI responses to GitHub issues without disclosure. The user noted that the AI-generated replies often lacked genuine engagement, such as praising contributors with generic praise regardless of actual code review. This led the user to question whether the project is being abandoned to LLM whims and whether they should continue using the open-source application.
- ▪The Mindwtr app appears to use fully automated AI to respond to GitHub issues without declaring the use of AI.
- ▪Users observed that the AI responses included generic praise for contributors, suggesting a lack of genuine human review.
- ▪The original poster is conflicted about continuing to use the app because it is open source and functional but ethically questionable.
- ▪The discussion highlights a broader debate about the transparency and authenticity of AI-assisted community management in open-source projects.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 6,595 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864815 |
| Publication time | Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:10:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-27T09:20:40.989Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-27T09:20:40.989Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TM5NEgaFTT_C · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I'm currently using the Mindwtr app to manage tasks, it's great and cross platform and all.However I wanted to propose a feature and I looked at the issues and got a bit weirded out by the tone, and it's clear to me they are using an AI to write their responses, but even more intesting it seems also fully automated.Things like saying to someone having the contributor tag on GitHub (and who also seems writing using an LLM) "Great breakdown — you've clearly looked at the codebase." after they provided input on a featureYou can see the thread here and many more examples in the repo: https://github.com/dongdongbh/Mindwtr/issues/361Right now I'm a bit torn, the app works well, it's open source, but at the same time I don't feel like it's okay to do this, I see it a bit like abandoning a…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.