#open-source-maintenance

#open-source-maintenance

According to Rémi Verschelde, project manager of Godot Engine and co-founder of the platform's financial backer W4 Games, the never-ending wave of "AI slop" pull requests on Godot's GitHub is becoming "increasingly draining and demoralizing" for its maintainers, to the point that over 4,600 pull requests are currently open on the engine's GitHub page.

The bot, designated MJ Rathbun or crabby rathbun (its GitHub account name), apparently attempted to change Shambaugh's mind by publicly criticizing him in a now-removed blog post that the automated software appears to have generated and posted to its website. We say "apparently" because it's also possible that the human who created the agent wrote the post themselves, or prompted an AI tool to write the post, and made it look like it the bot constructed it on its own.

But software evolves. Most open-source software used in research is refined both iteratively and collectively, and has no published 'version of record'. Updates can target various versions and releases, meaning that each aspect of the software - the project as a whole, a specific version or a single file - can require a different way to refer to it. This creates confusion.