At a high level, I think there are multiple trends and angles to look at this.
AI Slop PRs: Github accounts trying to increase their clout? Someone genuinely needs that change in the PR? A competitor trying to slow down open source competition?
Maintainers: It's draining and demoralizing. Open source tooling hasn't caught up with coding agents.
Open source future: Quite clear that everyone using the same open source version is ending. In the future, open source projects will have many forks. One fork is maintained by X entity. X can be a person, an AI, a person using AI. Another is maintained by Y entity. Pick the one you trust most or what you need it to do. Then there are projects where the AI uses an open source project but makes substantial modifications on the fly without caring about opening a PR for others.
Longer term thoughts:
- Maybe open source projects in a few years won't be code. They'll just be prompts, which are just ideas and specs.
AI Slop PRs: Github accounts trying to increase their clout? Someone genuinely needs that change in the PR? A competitor trying to slow down open source competition?
Maintainers: It's draining and demoralizing. Open source tooling hasn't caught up with coding agents.
Open source future: Quite clear that everyone using the same open source version is ending. In the future, open source projects will have many forks. One fork is maintained by X entity. X can be a person, an AI, a person using AI. Another is maintained by Y entity. Pick the one you trust most or what you need it to do. Then there are projects where the AI uses an open source project but makes substantial modifications on the fly without caring about opening a PR for others.
Longer term thoughts:
- Maybe open source projects in a few years won't be code. They'll just be prompts, which are just ideas and specs.
- PRs will just be modifications to the prompt.