I like the "maintainer stays in control" part, but isn't that also a problem in a way?

The AI provider gets paid, the platform gets paid (20% is a lot in my opinion!), and the maintainer gets more unpaid work: another PR to plan, review, revise, merge, and then maintain... that's a lot of work.

If people are willing to fund an issue, why should that money mainly cover LLM tokens rather than maintainer effort? Or at least, why doesn't the leftover money go to the maintainer instead of back to the donors?

While I definitely like the Patreon for Software Builders idea, that's got some moving pieces which take additional legal work. My hope is that could come in time as it would be really cool.

Regarding rewarding maintainer effort, I'm shooting for the value prop of "free AI", this only works if reconciliation is per-phase and liquidity is accessible across as many repos as possible. So if I had each reconcile drain the pool, there would be a lot of stalled work and human intervention required.

That said, there are probably some maintainers that don't want "free AI" and that's okay.

I don't think you understand if we were to just give people money then how are these platforms gonna take a cut of the action?

sounds like you do not support other people that have nothing to do with the code that you like

"We can pay you in exposure... And b̶e̶e̶r̶s̶ tokens!"