GoKawiilIs it the end of open source we know and love?
The End of Open Source as We Know It
When a few months ago GitHub shared statistics about celebrating an enormous contribution of AI in their product metrics , completely missing the point of degraded contribution quality, we already felt that things were going south.
The first worrying moment was the issue we posted with a $900 bounty . We were hoping to motivate someone to contribute and bring shiny new "MCP Apps" support to our platform. We quickly got the attention of legitimate contributors proposing plans, asking questions, submitting attempts — but soon...
AI bots arrived and blew up the issue, taking it to 253 comments total, poisoning the conversation with pointless "implementation plans" and even pure aggression toward the maintainers!
AI accounts started flooding not just this issue — but the entire repo. Every sloppy comment triggered a notification for every team member watching the repo. Our GitHub notifications became a wall of noise. Real conversations from contributors like @ethanwater, @developerfred, and @Geetk172 — people actively working on bounties — were getting buried.
27 pull requests, most of which contributors didn't even try testing. Later, the problem took the form of an epidemic. For example, just for the issue to add x.ai provider support to Archestra, we received, most of which
One of our team members had to spend half a day every week cleaning AI garbage out of the repo, removing untested PRs and closing hallucinated issues. When we forgot to do so, our repo quickly became a place completely unfriendly to legitimate contributors.
Fighting Back
At first, we tried to calculate the "reputation" of contributors and built "London-Cat" , a tiny bot calculating a contributor's reputation based on merged PRs and a few other signals ( example ). It obviously didn't stop the spam, but it helped us figure out "who is who".
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