That’s what I’ve been telling my PM: I don’t need your half-baked PR you one shotted from a prompt: put that prompt in GitHub Issues for the team to use later

I agree. For bug fixes, just write a clear issue: how to reproduce it, what goes wrong, what's the root cause. As short and well written as possible, without AI fluff.

Once you get to that point, you can copy paste your issue into an LLM and get a fix close to the PR you would open, but so can the maintainers, so what's the point of opening a PR and adding more friction?

In fact discussing the issue is way more productive since it's just about the actual issue, root cause and tradeoffs without the debates on implementation details and nitpicks.

If you want to contribute major features, you need to befriend, discuss and agree with the maintainers, I don't think drive-by PRs ever worked for this.

This has always been true to a large extent. Unless you're cleared to carve out your own space of a project, or you're working off an already detailed issue/feature request.

Do maintainers agree with this or do they feel you're just spamming them?

> 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.

My experience is that maintainers cannot do this. Or rather, that it is useless.