Speaker
Description
AI has made contributing to open source easier than ever. It has also made it harder than ever. Anyone can now generate pull requests, issues, and vulnerability reports in minutes, but maintainer capacity hasn't grown and review cost hasn't dropped. The result is a flood of low-signal contributions that is exhausting maintainers, as projects like curl have publicly documented, and drowning out the contributors who actually do good work.
This talk explores the new economics of open source contribution: when producing code costs almost nothing, the scarce resource becomes trust. Drawing on real experience maintaining a large open source project (hundreds of issues triaged monthly, AI-generated PRs that look correct until they aren't), I'll show why reputation is now the thing that scales, and how contributors can build it deliberately.
Attendees will leave with practical strategies: how to use LLMs as a tool rather than a substitute for understanding, why review cost asymmetry should shape how and when you submit, what makes a contribution cheap to review, and how to avoid becoming an accidental denial-of-service attack on the maintainers you're trying to help. Whether you're a first-time contributor or a maintainer setting policy, this talk offers a grounded look at how to keep open source human in the era of infinite code generation.
Any other info we should know?
Topic is non technical, should be an easy to grasp one.
Goal for audience is to understand why being human is more important than ever when contributing to open source projects.
Special accommodations
I live in El Salvador. Even while I'd love to participate on-campus, costs to move to the location are high.
I'd like to participate and present remotely
Session author's bio
Backend Developer @ Rocket.Chat. Worked in Open Source for the last 5 years focusing on helping new contributors to participate more.
GSoC mentor, tech blog writer & a regular human being.
| Level of Difficulty | Beginner |
|---|---|
| Social Media | x.com/kaleman15 |
| In Person Attendance | Remote |
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| Please confirm that there are included headshots of all speakers in their profiles | Yes |