Development quotes of the week

For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself.

AI tools have changed the economics of this very quickly. We use them ourselves every day, but a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds.

I've had so many conversations now with long-time very serious open source contributors and advocates from a bunch of different projects that all are basically versions of, "Are we still doing something worth doing? Have we become evil corporate drones but just poor and tired? Am I alone in caring about this?"