In the AI Era, Code Is Cheap. Reputation Isn’t.

In the era of AI it's easier than ever to be an Open Source contributor! But, at the same time, and quite paradoxically, it's harder than ever. Why? Because it's now mechanically easier, but reputationally harder Previously, you competed against other incredibly smart volunteers, or maybe against employed developers that contributed their expertise and free time to open source, or against newcomers. Now, you compete against all of that and an army of AI agents generating pull requests, issues, refactors and vulnerability reports faster than what any human can do. It's pretty tempting. Using an LLM can reduce significantly the cognitive work you have to do to understand a codebase, and even to produce a valuable change request. Things that were previously "very hard" to do are now a few prompts away, and that lowered the entry barrier for contributions, which is great! But also created a massive increase in volume, which is flooding repositories. What's the problem? Maintainer capacity