I feel this is something of a temporary and unstable equilibrium. Once the maintainers figure out how to harness agents more effectively, they can just have a daily bot job to poll all the forks and pull back stuff that looks good. We just don’t quite have the tooling and practices to scale the contributor side effectively.

I think OSS is going to look more like the original Git model, or perhaps even further towards “horizontal gene transfer” where memes/alleles get copied across various repos, rather than having a single lineage of phenotypes.

I would be interested if a common outcome was to have a fork with AI PRs and one with AI contributions disabled. Not only does it satisfy both camps, but it provides a longterm anecdote of the effects of agentic code quality and maintainability.

Yeah. I did almost the same with KDE Spectacle. It lacks good shortcut keys for annotations. I've just asked AI to add them. Sent a manually reviewed TINY patch to maintainers, never heard back.