That’s only feasible when the people who open PRs are acting in good faith, and control both the quality and volume of PRs to something that the maintainers can realistically (and ought to) review in their 2-3 hours of weekly free time.
Linux is a bit different. Your code can be rejected, or not even looked at in the first place, if it’s not a high quality and desired contribution.
Also, it’s not just about PR quality, but also volume. It’s possible for contributions to be a net benefit in isolation. But most open source maintainers only have an hour or so a week to review PRs and need to prioritize aggressively. People who code with AI agents would benefit themselves to ask “does this PR align with the priorities and time availability of the maintainer?”
For instance, I’m sure we could point AI at many open source projects and tell it to optimize performance. And the agent would produce a bunch of high quality PRs that are a good idea in isolation. But what if performance optimization isn’t a good use of time for a given maintainer’s weekly code review quota?
Sure, maintainers can simply close the PR without a reason if they don’t have time.
But I fear we are taking advantage of nice people, who want to give a reasoned response to every contribution, but simply can’t keep up with the volume that agents can produce.
Is it? Remember when that agent wrote a hit piece about the maintainer because he wouldn't merge it's PR?
Linux is somewhat harder to contribute to and they already have sufficient barriers in place so they can rely on more reasonable human actors.
We already had that happening with other kinds of automated tooling, but at least it used to be easier to detect by quick skimming.
As someone who has been using AI extensively lately, this is my preferred way of doing serious projects with them:
Let them create the plan, help them refine it, let them rip; then scrutinize their diffs, fight back on the parts I don't like or don't trust; rinse and repeat until commit.
Yet I assume this would still be unacceptable to most anti-AI projects, because 90%+ of the committed code was "written by the AI."
> why would I want to go back and forth with an LLM through PR comments when I could just talk to the agent myself in real time?
Presumably for the same reason you go back and forth with humans through PR comments even when you could just code it yourself in real time. That reason being, the individual on the other end of the PR should be saving you time. It's still hard work contributing quality MRs, even with AI.