Your contributors are AI-first now. Is your project?

The same question keeps coming up in maintainer conversations: what do you do when the pull request queue fills with work written by agents?

It’s something Nicholas Tindle, founding AI engineer at AutoGPT, also deals with every day. I spoke with him in May for Maintainer Month. At the time of the interview, AutoGPT had over 180,000 stars and around 150 open pull requests. A big chunk of those pull requests were written by agents, including Copilot, OpenClaw, and AutoGPT’s own internal tooling, among others. Most maintainers I talk to have the same reaction: close the door. Turn off pull requests. Don’t tax the team with reviewing slop.

Nicholas saw an upside:

It’s basically somebody else paying for your compute.

Nicholas Tindle, founding AI engineer at AutoGPT