Ask HN: AI for maintenance of open source abandonware?

I've been thinking about this over the past few days - If AI is as capable as people here claim - enough to replace junior or intermediate developers - could it be used to maintain semi-abandoned open-source projects?

There is a fair number of abandoned OSS with 1 or 2 major issues that prevent them from continuing to work and isn't too difficult to fix - just requires time. If users pooled context (issues, code, docs) and tokens, I'm inclined to believe an AI agent could resolve them.

Here's an example: hydroxide [0] is a ProtonMail to IMAP/SMTP bridge that no longer works due to upstream API changes [1]. Working implementations are available, just in a different language [2]. All an AI would have to do is reference the current implementation and the alternative implementation, then migrate over to the new API format. Perhaps use an mitmproxy MCP to verify that the requests made are identical. Overall, not a very difficult problem and I can probably do it myself given a few days.

Human engineering hours are quite expensive though and for such a low value task, I would assume an AI agent would be more cost effective.

Is anyone working on a similar problem/premise?

[0] https://github.com/emersion/hydroxide [1] https://github.com/emersion/hydroxide/issues/304 [2] https://github.com/opulentfox-29/protonmail-api-client/blob/master/src/protonmail/client.py