TL;DR

Open source projects that I contribute to have adopted AI bots to ease the pull request (PR) process. It might just be me (though I doubt it), but somehow it feels less like a personal attack when a bot tells you what’s wrong with your PR than when it’s a person doing it. This is likely a multiple win for maintainers – less toil, fewer confrontations, and thus more precious attention to focus on making their project better.

Easier to swallow

I love open source, and it’s been my honour to contribute to many of the projects I admire over the years. But contributing can be a difficult and fractious process, especially for a first time contributor to a mature project. Maintainers may have spent years establishing their project culture – ‘how things work around here’, and that doesn’t necessarily get completely captured in contributing.md. They also know their way around the code to an extent that a less involved contributor never will.

Somebody (like me) shows up eager to make things even better, but that enthusiasm can be quickly dented by (seemingly) negative feedback from the maintainers. Your being told, by a person, that your work isn’t good enough. It takes some fortitude on both sides – the contributor has to accept the feedback and keep on trying, whilst the maintainer(s) need to keep expending effort that’s unlikely to be worth it for a single PR[1]. Hopefully they’re shaping a future contributor who’ll come back with more improvements, and fewer silly mistakes – next time.

Bots take the person, and the emotion out of the picture.

If my PR fails a bunch of continuous integration (CI) tests, then I don’t get angry with the tests; I just know that I’ve made a foolish mistake that needs to be fixed.

Similarly if a large language model (LLM) based bot tells me to sharpen things up (in aspects that maybe aren’t so easy to turn into CI tests) then I know there’s no point in trying to argue with it. Just do the thing and hope that the next pass works better.

Infinitely patient

All too often maintainers aren’t great at telling you what’s needed to make things satisfactory. They know what good looks like, you should know too – it’s all there in the repo, and past PRs. Do they really have to spoon feed you every little detail? It’s all so tiresome.

The bot doesn’t get bored, or frustrated, or come across as antagonistic. It just says what’s wrong, and suggests how to make it right.

Easing toil

There have been a lot of words typed on blogs and opinion pieces, or said on podcasts, about how AI is destroying open source; where torrents of slop are inundating maintainers.

And this feels like the fight back. AI tools to do the tiresome stuff, the toil, so that maintainers can spent their precious time and mental sanity on things that really matter.

My personal experience of this has been with ‘artisan’ PRs lovingly created by hand. Though I suspect things work much the same for PRs made my agents. The contributing agent can iterate with the reviewing bot until things are in shape – it’s all just part of the ‘loop’.

Conclusion

There’s been a lot of gloom about open source in a post AI world, and this feels like a ray of hope.

Just like it’s ‘better’ to deal with a website than a call centre, it can also be better to deal with a bot than a real person – on both sides of the relationship.

Note

[1] My first PR for one project ran to 29 comments, from 4 maintainers, resulting in 15 commits. It felt like a hazing ritual.