Open Source Is Dead. Long Live Open Source. — Saoud Rizwan, Cline
AI-generated contributions are eroding trust and community in open source projects.
“GitHub is effectively uh an archive of SLOP PRs and issues and security reports um where the sense of community before has turned into this like deep skepticism and distrust”
Cline founder Saoud Rizwan argues that AI coding tools have fundamentally damaged open source community dynamics over the past two years, flooding GitHub with low-quality AI-generated PRs, issues, and bug reports. He cites Zig banning all AI contributions to preserve contributor relationships, and curl's CEO considering shutting down their decades-old bug bounty program due to AI-generated spam. This is a meaningful signal that the open source ecosystem is now actively grappling with AI misuse as a systemic infrastructure problem.