Godot's recent announcement spelled something out clearly: when a mid-tier rando contributes, you can provide feedback to that person and possibly help them grow into being a senior contributor or even a maintainer. That possibility of helping the human behind the code is part of the motivation for doing open-source. Mentoring shitty devs is itself giving back to the community, in a different form than the code itself is. And that is qualitatively different than giving feedback to an LLM.

I think I'm also going to refer people to the Godot foundation's statement on this from now on. Too often people try to lay it out like a moral conundrum, or some kind of purity test for "real" programmers vs larpers, but that's all just lips flapping. Meanwhile there are real-life practical consequences that follow taking AI contributions, and the Godot foundation has done a great job articulating what those things are. It's very nice for there to be a voice like saying these things.

That is a good point indeed.

I am wondering though if that was really the world we were living in just before chatGPT launched, given that the whole OSS thing was already harvested super hard.

The "mentoring opportunities" often were just extracting free consulting out of experts + building a portfolio for getting hired by big tech.

Would we really want to go back to that?

So I agree with the idea but only in a vacuum, I think.