Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

This study focused on experienced OSS maintainers. Here is my personal experience, but a very different persona (or opposite to the one in the study). I always wanted to contribute to OSS but never had time to. Finally was able to do that, thanks to AI. Last month, I was able to contribute to 4 different repositories which I would never have dreamed of doing it. I was using an async coding agent I built[1], to generate PRs given a GitHub issue. Some PRs took a lot of back and forth. And some PRs were accepted as is. Without AI, there is no way I would have contributed to those repositories.

One thing that did work in my favor is that, I was clearly creating a failing repro test case, and adding before and after along with PR. That helped getting the PR landed.

There are also a few PRs that never got accepted because the repro is not as strong or clear.

[1] https://workback.ai

Did you make the contributions though? Or did the LLM?

This is not directed at you, but I am worried that contributors that use AI "exclusively" to contribute to OSS projects are extracting the value (street cred, being seen as part of the project community) without actually contributing anything (by being one more person that knows the codebase and can help steward it).

It's the same thing we've seen out of enshittification of everything. Value extraction without giving back.

Maybe I'm too much of a cynic. Maybe majority of OSS projects don't care. But I know I will be saddened if one of the OSS projects I care about get taken over by such "value extractors".

Did not take it personal. You brought up a good point.

I've slightly alternate perspective. Imo, using OSS without contributing is the value extraction without giving back.

If someone can fix a bunch of chores (that still take human time), with the use of AI (even though they don't become stewards), I still see it as giving back. Of course, there is a value chain - contributing with AI without understanding code is the bottom of value creation. Like you mentioned, also being a steward is the top of the value chain. Along the way, if the contributor builds some sorta reputation that would help with their career or other outcomes, so be it.

So in that sense, I don't see it as enshittification. AI might make a pathway to resolve a bunch of things which otherwise wouldn't be resolved. In fact, this was the line of thinking for the tool we built. Instead of people making these mindless PRs, can we build an agent that can take care of 'trivial' tasks. I manually created PRs to test that hypothesis.

There is also a natural self selection here. If someone was able to fix something without understanding any code, that is also indicative of how trivial the task is. There is a reverse effect to my argument though. These "AI contributors" can create a ton of PRs that would create a lot of work for maintainers to review them.

In my case, I was being upfront about how I'm raising PRs and requesting permissions if it is OK to work on certain issue. Maintainers are quite open and inviting.