AI Is Killing Open Source, and Maintainers Are Closing the Door
Open Source as We Know It Is Dead
Open source is dying, not from license battles but from AI-generated noise. Maintainers are shutting down PRs: curl ended its bug bounty, tldraw auto-closes external PRs, and Sindre Sorhus disabled them entirely. The cost to create code has plummeted, but the cost to review it hasn't—so the burden falls on volunteers. The author, a self-taught developer, reflects on how the human connection that once made open source magical is being buried under a flood of plausible but low-effort contributions.
The cost to create has dropped but the cost to review has not.
- FlowingRiver
I could not imagine the pain being being the head of a Libre/Open project nowadays.
It used to suck when there was almost nobody contributing because it felt isolated. Worse was if your project did become popular, you would be managing loads of code AND spending loads of time managing the community than the code.
Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with, just a flood of code with few people you can't actually question it with. So back to isolation but with a million lines of code.
It feels like you would have to have a project with an direct artificial limit to increase the quality of submissions. Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.
- injidup
There is also the fact that Maintainers simply don't need contributions any more. This I've noticed also happens at work. Everyone is maintaining their own mini stacks of things. Contribution is up cooperation is down. Why go talk to a colleague when you can talk to Claude? Change is everywhere.
- r0m4n0
I feel this deeply... but as an engineer at a big tech company. Over the past decade, I meticulously learned the code base and frameworks, attained readability of various programming languages, etc. I carefully wrote and reviewed code from engineers that took the time to understand what was there and how to make it better or add to it. Carefully crafting comments for feedback every so carefully to not over critique. Over the past 6 months, I have come to realize that world no longer exists. With scores of seemingly high quality code reviews from folks that don't understand what they are contributing to, it's impossible to keep up. I am also not at a place where I can say, I'm making a smaller trusted circle. Many folks in my circle are simply ramping up the quantity of code they want me to review. I simply have to rely more and more on AI to review the code and help me figure out what exactly it does. At the same time, I am also needing to generate more and more code to keep up with the expectations of those around me. We are now instructing our agents to leave comments, having the agents respond to those comments, even long threads where the agents debate technical decisions either both human author and human reviewer almost totally removed from the loop.
We are all getting more and more removed from the profession of writing code. It's like we abstracted away all of the details of writing code and we are spending our days just sending 100 interns on project quests.
I think […]
- phlakaton
I think the answer is straightforward. You complain that a substantial PR is no longer evidence of good faith. What is evidence? Participation in the community.
I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.
- jcupitt
We just banned gen-AI PRs, it seems to be working so far.
Commercial dev is about results and money, and that makes AI almost impossible to resist.
OSS has always been about process. The pleasure is in tinkering with code, collaborating with friends on a fun new idea, and helping people. I don't care about speed.