I wouldn’t pretend to have an answer. of course. Opens Source means, always meant, different things to different people.
I know what always counted for me:
1. Copyleft License
2. No CLA or Copyright assignment
3. Diverse group of contributors
I sympathize with Miguels point but it bothers me it clashes with point 3 in my list. If you hand select your contributors[1] you will never reach the diversity necessary to effectively make relicensing impossible. Without that Open Source matters less to me.
[1] I admit that controlled set of known contributors has other advantages too.
I feel bad for people like him who get the brunt of dilettantes who can "code" polluting his time and focus. Reminds me of that mitch hedberg joke: "When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying here you throw this away." but for PRs
Review is indeed the main bottleneck now for open source, and we need to solve it. Introducing more friction is hardly helping.
I can see why that doesn't sound great particularly on a team where everyone knows each other and is working together but it totally makes sense for me if I were maintaining a project that was large enough to get a lot of low-effort PRs coming into it.
A company is usually already a high-trust environment, where people use real names and have real reputations. So creating an issue cannot serve the purpose of increasing trust.
> My initial task when a new unexpected PR arrives is to determine if there is a person behind it or not, and luckily this is easy to figure out in just a few seconds.
OK. How? That would have been an interesting explanation to me.
> I do not want an LLM-generated novel with chapters, bullet points and emojis, just a simple description of the problem in your own voice.
> If I don't see proof of human involvement, then I'm not interested
I think it does but there are weird dynamics I don’t fully understand. I’m curious about HNs thoughts.
My theories: Centralization around key projects due to AI pointing new users towards them. (At the same time this drives up the PR deluge onto these projects. Especially from newer users already heavily using llms.)
So many low effort AI-generated open source libraries that it becomes harder to tell signal from slop. More movement to the bigger projects because they are perceived as safer bets.
Are there concrete patterns that somebody could write a linter to auto evaluate for this?
I have a Jira queue. It drives what work I do. I may have some leeway in how I do the work, and what tickets I pull, but Im absolutely at the behest of the ticketing behemoth.
Tickets have been my life since I started helpdesk. And future roles will also be ticketed. And they almost all are customer-facing or system-breakage (which impacts lots of customers).
Im not sure what IT roles im capable of doing wouldnt have tickets. So, yeah. Reverse centaur.. But not an AI driven reverse centaur, yet.
We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-demand app store where features / forks are shared/upvoted/evolved by the community where the maintainers don't have to get burnt out, and when it inevitably becomes a ball of mud oh well it does the job? I really don't know!
I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?
At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.
A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.
There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it and generally they all coexist hapily
You mean some modern version of vb or php?
That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.
I don’t want software written by plebs.
There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.
What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?
If you order a pizza from an app, and assume you can pick ingredients from a checklist, would you consider it "making" a pizza? Would people get the feel of accomplishment?
It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce