And creates a new class of problems. Why not just fork the project and modify it yourself at that point, and cut out the maintainer middleman.

I actually do that quite often these days. Keeping synced with upstream is trivial these days with a modern agent. Even just pi with DeepSeek V4 Flash can do it. It's a huge free-rider issue, but there's no way for me to contribute even human changes upstream because I'll be lost in the AI contributions so I don't bother.

So almost everything is forked and I then just have the agent keep my changes in sync with upstream. Works like a charm. I suspect my pattern is commonplace.

Because it is vibecoded garbage.

Why fork at all? Why not just vendor the dependency and slop the changes you want on top of it? You can even pull from upstream down the line for the latest updates.

The problem is sloppers really, really want other people to use their code, so they feel useful for doing a bit of prompting, probably to rationalize how much they pay Anthropic et al to do the actual work for them. I just wish they'd direct that money directly to the projects they find useful instead of trying to insert themselves as middlemen.