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I see a lot of oss forks in the future where people just fork to fix their issues with LLMs without going through maintainers. Or even doing full LLM rewrites of smaller stuff.

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Well it's an operating system. Ideally safety and reliability are prioritized. I think the scope and complexity of an operating system are large enough both to make a lot of changes non-trivial and to trip up LLMs. I think it's fine if you have an unstable release stream or you have bleeding edge forks that move faster than upstream. This is already the case...

Probably, but on the other hand, this is almost literally the definition of technical debt -- it's great to get fixes uptreamed precisely so that you don't have to maintain your own fork, keep it in sync, etc. an LLM can likely lower the burden of that but the burden still exists.

Yeah, but what can you do if you need a thing done and now there's an option to have it done.

I don't disagree.

I assume that most of these purely llm generated unwanted contributions will just end up in dead end forks, because my impression is that a lot of them are just being generated as GitHub activity fodder. But the stuff that really solves a problem for a person - eh, good. Problem solved is problem solved. (Unless it creates new problems)

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