"That mismatch worked, if uncomfortably, when contributing had friction. After all, you had to care enough to reproduce a bug, understand the codebase, and risk looking dumb. But AI agents are obliterating that friction (and have no problem with looking dumb). Even Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of HashiCorp, is now considering closing external PRs to his open source projects, not because he's losing faith in open source, but because he's drowning in "slop PRs" generated by large language models and their AI agent henchmen."
"This is the "agent psychosis" that Flask creator Armin Ronacher laments. Ronacher describes a state where developers become addicted to the dopamine hit of agentic coding and spin up agents to run wild through their own projects and, eventually, through everyone else's. The result is a massive degradation of quality. These pull requests are often vibe-slop: code that feels right because it was generated by a statistical model but lacks the context, the trade-offs, and the historical understanding."
Open-source projects are predominantly maintained by a tiny core of unpaid contributors, often one or two people, while companies rely on that infrastructure. High contribution friction previously limited low-value submissions because contributors had to reproduce bugs, understand codebases, and risk public exposure. AI agents and large language models are removing that friction, enabling anyone or automated agents to generate and submit pull requests rapidly. Many AI-generated PRs are low-quality, context-free 'slop' that lack trade-off consideration and historical knowledge. Agentic tools that can explore codebases and autonomously submit changes amplify the problem, increasing maintainers' workload and degrading overall project quality.
Read at InfoWorld
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