Yeah I sympathize with this, but I’ve experienced the other side of this: I ran into a bug (an integration for home assistant has to be manually kicked every time HA restarts due to a bug in the integration) that my AI fixed with a one-liner. It works great for me. I submitted a PR which is languishing for weeks. No problem. My AI will just maintain a personal fork with my patch until my PR gets merged (or not). Previously it was way too much work maintaining your own fork, merging in upstream changes, and keeping your patch working.

I think this is going to be a common outcome from the fact that many people have AI agents that can one-shot fix and deploy. Maybe it’s not a bad thing for those people and the maintainers who each get what they want.

I feel this is something of a temporary and unstable equilibrium. Once the maintainers figure out how to harness agents more effectively, they can just have a daily bot job to poll all the forks and pull back stuff that looks good. We just don’t quite have the tooling and practices to scale the contributor side effectively.

I think OSS is going to look more like the original Git model, or perhaps even further towards “horizontal gene transfer” where memes/alleles get copied across various repos, rather than having a single lineage of phenotypes.

Yeah. I did almost the same with KDE Spectacle. It lacks good shortcut keys for annotations. I've just asked AI to add them. Sent a manually reviewed TINY patch to maintainers, never heard back.

I would be interested if a common outcome was to have a fork with AI PRs and one with AI contributions disabled. Not only does it satisfy both camps, but it provides a longterm anecdote of the effects of agentic code quality and maintainability.