Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to cultural communication differences :) )

I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue.

I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.

On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source.

Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.