Hey all, update on the tldraw policy with regard to contributions.
For the good of the project, we're going to begin automatically closing pull requests from external contributors. We will of course continue to welcome issues, bug reports, and discussions. This is a temporary policy until GitHub provides better tools for managing contributions.
Getting ahead of it
Like many other open-source projects on GitHub, we’ve recently seen a significant increase in contributions generated entirely by AI tools. While some of these pull requests are formally correct, most suffer from incomplete or misleading context, misunderstanding of the codebase, and little to no follow-up engagement from their authors.
An open pull request represents a commitment from maintainers: that the contribution will be reviewed carefully and considered seriously for inclusion. For that commitment to remain meaningful, we need to be more selective. For now, that means closing first and selectively re-opening pull requests that are actually under consideration, with the expectation that most unsolicited submissions will not be reviewed.
Weird year coming
I first made the tldraw repository public in 2021, and I’ve been proud to invite public contribution to its code and have been happy to have many improving pull requests over the years. I’m sorry to shut that down, however I sincerely believe this decision is in the best interests of the project, our code, and our community. With luck, GitHub will soon roll out management features that let us open things back up.
This is going to be a weird year for programmers and open source especially. For now, whether you’ve contributed before, are interested in contributing in the future, or just are a friend of the project: thank you and please hang on while we all figure this stuff out.