alt Hacker NewsI think this is the end of open-contributions, the maintainers already having too much on their plate.
Plus it is becoming exceedingly rare of finding a contributor that save time, as in can do better than the maintainer itself using LLM and reviewing it itself.
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if someone wants to contribute, they need to prove they produce value to the project. I dont think this is controversial at all.
The fact of being open source means if your contributions are rejected, you simply need to fork. The open market competition will soon determine if your contributions were truly valuable and whether the original project's owner misjudged, or that contribution was essentially worthless.
It can still work. For example if you look at https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/issues they have a whole bunch of tooling that uses AI to automatically triage and come up with PRs automatically.
It's the end of open-contributions for one specific repository, that is all. It only covers QGIS, the UI application, not GDAL/GEOS and the other libraries that give it its functionality. Additionally, in the past few years the number and popularity of new open-source projects that do accept open contributions far exceeds the few old ones that do not.
Expanding on that, the issue is aggravating the maintainers bottleneck, because how do you find new maintainers if you do not accept outside contributions?
Another option would be to make a contributor pay for the review of its PR, even a small fee, to deter AI-slop, at least for new contributors. It could/would exclude students or people with the lowest wage though, but I'm optimistic even a 1$ bill or less would be enough.
Tbf most projects are especially gatekeepy..... they've been even before AI came onto the scene. All what changed is making changes easier (slop it out instead of the classic one-line readme edit) and making it easier to fork projects.
Traditionally you've opened to a PR only to get closed for a style/procedural issue or get ghosted. You often didn't fork because maintenance is a hassle. Less so with LLMs, you know?
Nowadays you can just implement your change and vibe-fork it...
My experience lately is the best way to contribute to open source now is to just write detailed issues. The maintainer can then paste them in to an AI tool themselves and go back and forth faster than they could comment feedback to you and wait for changes.