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Vibe Maintainer

Steve Yegge

18 min read·<br>Mar 31, 2026

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Some attendees at an AI Tinkerers meetup in early Feb were asking me what it’s like to be the maintainer of a big OSS project where the community PRs are all AI slop. They thought it would make for a good blog post. I thought so too, at the time!<br>It turned out to be very, very, very hard to write down. It’s in many ways the opposite of conventional wisdom for software maintainers, OSS or otherwise. So this post has given me over 2 months of writer’s block. (I had to update that duration many times while writing this.)<br>Why is it so important for me to tell you how I deal with a storm of AI-generated PRs? Because I’m beginning to believe that my “vibe maintainer” workflow, crazy as it might sound, will be what a lot of you are doing before long. Everyone who works on successful OSS will soon have to deal with PR storms.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

Vibe Maintainer: Using AI to help manage AI-generated PRsThe Rising Tide<br>To give you a sense of the scale I work at, I’m cruising towards 50 contributor PRs a day, combined between Beads (20k stars, 5 months old) and Gas Town (13k stars, 3 months old). That’s seven days a week; if I take a day or two off, they pile up and I may have to deal with 100 or more in a single day.<br>It’s an enthusiastic community. We’ve had over 1000 unique contributors between the two repos, with over 4k PRs (2300+ merged), and over 15k commits, all in just a few months. And we have a great community with almost two thousand Gas Town users hanging out chatting on the Gas Town Hall Discord.<br>Through all that, my median time to resolution is about 15 hours, with few PRs waiting more than a few days. This is high velocity. But I still manage to keep my quality bar high enough that both projects continue to exhibit strong growth. It may look like I’m only merging 60% of the PRs from the metrics, but that’s an artifact of fix-merging. I actually merge about 88% of all incoming contributor PRs, one way or another, and both projects are flourishing from it.<br>Beads in particular is well-integrated with the broader ecosystem — for instance, it now has solid integration with GitHub, GitLab, Linear, JIRA, Azure DevOps, Notion, and five self-hosted storage options. This is all encapsulated as a rich plugin interface for backend engines that each of them implement. Nearly all of that was from community contributions.<br>It’s safe to say people love Beads and Gas Town, even though mostly only agents have ever seen their source code. I certainly haven’t. No time for field trips.<br>I’m a very lazy person, and maintaining a popular OSS repo, let alone two of them, would simply not have been possible for me, like ever, up until maybe a year ago. I’m getting by with AI, that’s the only way. As my PR volume has increased, I’ve been able to keep afloat through model and tool improvements, automating as much of the decision tree as I can.<br>Even with AI help, keeping up with community PRs takes me 15–20 hours a week, usually 2 to 3 hours a day. Sometimes much, much more.<br>I wish I could tell you it’s easy work. I have at least managed to automate all the easy stuff, which is about half the PRs, sometimes up to two thirds of them. I was recently inspired by Dane Poyzer’s gt-toolkit package — a series of Gas Town formulas he published, which now has its own little user subcommunity. Dane’s formulas help you run his ambitious long running idea-to-delivery workflow, which is geared at comprehensive feature development and moving through mountains of work with his Gas Towns. My own PR workflow is now a formula as well.<br>Before we dive into the vibe maintainer workflow, let’s revisit why it’s needed at all. Am I not just bringing this on myself by allowing AI-assisted PRs in the first place?<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

Live of a Vibe Maintainer: Gems and Dead BirdsSaying No to AI: The “Fork You” Problem<br>Since 99% of my incoming PR submissions are AI-generated, it stands to reason that I could reduce my workload by 99% by saying “No AI PRs.” In that world, instead of doing all this crazy vibe maintainer stuff, I’d just wake up every morning, brew some coffee, shake my fist at the sky, browse HN, and maybe take the mule to town. The easy life.<br>Most OSS maintainers go this route. They straight-up forbid AI-generated or even AI-assisted pull requests. And I can understand why. The crap you see in AI-generated PRs these days can turn you into the Clint Eastwood angry-porch meme, practically overnight. Rather than deal with it, they outlaw it.<br>That of course triggers an arms race. You can get an AI-assisted PR accepted, but only if you sneak it in. So we hear comical stories of once-rejected PRs suddenly being accepted after they’re resubmitted with...