Your First Pull Request Used to Be a Coin Flip
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Your First Pull Request Used to Be a Coin Flip<br>How to become a contributor on an open-source AI project — measured across 143,000 pull requests
David Park<br>Jul 21, 2026
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Can a stranger still get into an open-source AI project? In early July 2026 I set out to find out — both by trying it myself and by measuring it at scale. I had Claude fetch the complete PR history of the GitHub repositories for eighteen major open-source AI projects and analyze every pull request across their whole history. Claude found roughly 143,000 PRs opened by external engineers who aren’t members of the project teams. Everything below is reproducible from the raw data; the method and its caveats are at the end, because a claim you can’t check is just a vibe with a decimal point.<br>For those who don’t know, pull requests — PRs — are how software engineers contribute to open source projects. Each PR represents a proposed change: a new feature, a bug fix, a documentation improvement. Getting one merged is how you become a contributor at all. And the headline finding, before any of the detail, is that landing your first one used to be close to a coin flip — but in 2026, on most projects, it’s now worse. Even so, I managed to get my first PR merged into a major AI project in less than a day.<br>Thanks for reading Building in the Loop! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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Of those PRs, roughly 84,000 were merged. That number matters more than any other in this piece, because a merged PR is the currency an open source contributor is judged by — each one is a decision by the team to keep your change in their product. A PR that doesn’t merge ends in one of two other states: closed — shut without merging, which lumps together maintainer declines, authors withdrawing their own PRs, and procedural closes — or still open , meaning no decision has been made at all. GitHub has no reject button; those three states are the entire record.<br>Why I was the one knocking
A word on why a product manager was running this experiment on himself, because it shapes why one specific mechanism — the pull request — mattered so much to me.<br>I have a CS degree from MIT and had been a software developer early in my career, but I transitioned to product management over 20 years ago. At Facebook, I initially ran the Notifications team within their storied Growth org and later ran their Mobile App Install Ads team, which contributed $6 billion in annual revenue to the company. Coding had always been my first love, though — ever since I programmed my first BASIC adventure game on my TRS-80 in the fifth grade.<br>In 2019, my career got derailed by a stroke that left me with left-sided paralysis and a severe speech disability. Since then I’d been mostly absent from the workforce — it’s very difficult to imagine running a product team when you can’t even speak clearly. But in May 2026 I found my way back to coding. I discovered a way to develop software using a two-agent AI setup: the Claude app on my Mac to write detailed specs, and Claude Code on the server to implement them. (See my walkthrough of the two-agent Claude workflow for how it works.) With Claude’s help, I felt I could deliver software I’d have been proud to ship at Facebook.<br>This is exactly why open-source contribution — and the pull request specifically — was the right mechanism for me. Almost all of the work can be done asynchronously, without meetings. I can still type with one hand, and every part of it is communication in writing, without my needing to speak. The judgment I’d built over decades of shipping software hadn’t been touched by the stroke; the PR is a way to put that judgment to work through a channel my disability doesn’t block. Given the seven-year gap in my résumé, contributing to a project I could get noticed on — by the project’s own team, and potentially by recruiters at AI companies — looked like the most direct way back.<br>So I set out to find the right projects, and enlisted my Claude agents to help. It was important to find projects that are genuinely receptive to new contributors — which turns out to be the whole question, and a measurable one.<br>The four rungs: outsider, contributor, collaborator, insider
Before reviewing the rest of the numbers, here’s the ladder they’re measuring. Getting from the outside of an open source project to the inside is not one rung in the ladder — it’s four rungs, and almost everyone stops on the first.<br>An outsider is anyone in the project’s orbit who hasn’t landed a change: someone who uses the tool, files an issue, stars the repo, maybe opens a pull request that never merges. Most of a project’s audience never climbs past here — they were never trying to.<br>A contributor has cleared the first real bar: at least one merged pull request. Their code is in the product. This is the rung this whole article is about.<br>A collaborator has been...