As a "new" maintainer myself - how do you decide when to ban someone? I sometimes feel overwhelmed and I can feel a big uptick in huge PRs with huge LLM written descriptions but often I also don't want to be an asshole to my community & reject all their changes.

Remove the human element. Yes, someone spent time fixing a bug. If the fix doesn't look like it makes sense on its own, do not merge it. If the author tries to convince you that it's a good fix, it's an immediate no.

A good fix (which is the only acceptable fix in open-source software), is one that speaks for itself.

One popular solution lately has been instead of banning too much, because of the danger of false positives, to use vouch [0]. Trusted people get vouched and you prioritize their actions. Unknown people (or agents) need to gain trust to be vouched and bad actors can still be banned.

[0]: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

I'm not a maintainer but as the quote goes: "I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." I'd suggest you keep a sense of how much effort they've put into packaging their PR to be the minimum change required to achieve its goal vs effort required by you to read it. Reject low-effort or overly verbose work.

IMHO OSS doesn't work if every 1 hr of contributor time spent on a change requires 1 hr of maintainer time to review. Contributor time spent on polishing, tidying and breaking down work is essential, and so maintainer time is a fraction of total time spent on a change.

If you draw a firm boundary with that contributor, and they continue to push, ban them.

"This doesn't meet the standards of our project for reason xyz. Please refrain from submitting further PRs that do not adhere to our contribution guidelines outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md."

If they continue, ban them.

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