GoKawiilI'm Rahul, and I work at Greptile, where we build AI agents that review pull requests. Greptile reviews PRs for OpenClaw which became the fastest-growing repo in GitHub history almost overnight. That gave us a front row seat to something strange.
Last December, OpenClaw was getting two pull requests a week. By February, that number jumped to 3,400/week. Before the spike, ~48% of PRs got merged; after, fewer than 9.3% of PRs got merged.
Many of those PRs were low-effort slop which were often generated by people's AI coding agents. For example, one contributor submitted 106 PRs in a single day, with the median time between submissions being three seconds.
In many ways, openclaw/openclaw offers us a preview of what the future of open source contribution may look like. Here are three observations:
PRs will require sender reputation
PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s.
When I first looked at the OpenClaw data, the pattern reminded me of email. In 2000, the ILOVEYOU worm infected 45 million computers in 24 hours because the cost of sending email approached zero and people trusted the platform. As a result, people were receiving a much higher volume of emails, and some of them were malicious. Those same parameters apply to PRs today.
The first fixes are similar: blocklists to manage volume, and confidence-based filters and reputation infrastructure to catch bad actors. Today, whether your email reaches its recipient's inbox comes down to two things: who you are, and your sending history.
Contributors on OpenClaw are already being filtered by their reputation: 8.2% merge rate for first-timers, 10.3% for contributors with 2-5 PRs, 18.6% for 5+.
Mitchell Hashimoto created and maintains Ghostty, one of the most popular open source terminal emulators. As the project gained momentum, people submitted such a high volume of AI-generated PR slop that he needed to limit AI-generated contributions.
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