I'm no AI-evangelist, but this makes them look like AI-luddites. Gatekeeping that will only shrink the number of contributors over time. If someone finds the projects interesting, but can't contribute, they'll just fork the projects and let AI run wild - there's no way human engineers can keep up with the sheer speed of AI-enhanced updates.

Is that a bad thing? MANY of these projects ban PRs made with LLMs, without explicitely mentioning being against AI in general. Since AI drastically increases how much code you can write, they might not need LLM contributions from outside - they can just prompt themselves.

In that case, only getting a few, hand written PRs could mean getting fewer, but higher quality contributers.

Other projects might not care about getting many contributers, many stars or being widely used. It might simply be a small project someone wants to code by hand. That's absolutely valid, many people still have fun coding by hand.

The truth is just that there are a lot of slop PRs currently, where ppl just sicced an LLM on a problem, did not validate any findings, did not check the code, did not read the output and just acted as a meat proxy. In many cases, these bans on LLM PRs are simply a reaction to this flood of PRs. After all, as I said above - everyone can do those prompts themselves, they don't need a PR for that.

> Gatekeeping that will only shrink the number of contributors over time.

That is the purpose.

If I am maintaining a project, I don't need your LLM contributions. I can prompt on my own.

Now, if you have some insight to offer that a LLM cannot give me, then I might listen.

The vast majority of AI-driven contributions are worse than useless. They contribute nothing of value, and cost a lot of volunteer-time to filter out. Not having an endless deluge of AI-driven slop contributions is a net positive, as it prevents the existing contributors from burning out.

Sure, it might hurt some vibecoder feelings that "Claude, write a useful contribution to this project, make no mistakes" returns in them getting banned rather than a mention as a valuable new contributor of a load-bearing OSS component, but that's a price many projects are happy to pay. Any genuinely valuable new contributor would have no trouble spending five minutes writing a PR in their own voice, before asking volunteers to spend fifty minutes reviewing it.