Maintainer's advice on contributing to open-source in 2026

As an open-source maintainer, you imagine the ideal contributor as an individual that is excited about your project, uses it and understands it, and wants to contribute to make it better for themselves, others, or because of an exciting technical problem.<br>You get to share ideas with them, learn from each other, maybe even get to know them a bit as a person in the process, and they inspire you to do better work. A profoundly human, intellectual interaction, inspiring and fulfilling, sometimes resulting in a life-long relationship.

When that happens, it is an amazing experience, absolutely my favorite part of building open-source software.

I still remember when Craig, whom we didn't know yet then, came out of nowhere and shared his proposal for formal language grammar for Wasp, a proper Latex document: I had to take a week to refresh my knowledge of type inference and language grammars just to be able to respond. The whole team looked together at that document, not believing the work put into it. He ended up doing 3 summer internships in a row with us, implementing a big part of Wasp compiler and language server, and was a delight to work with.

Or, another situation when I got somewhat stuck on pushing Windows support for Wasp forward, and @nodtem66 came in with investigation and experiments of his own, effectively unblocking me and becoming a brainstorming partner for driving the feature forward. I remember being impressed by the thoroughness of the work from his side, there was that level of rigor to it that took me back to the uni times, and it was quite an inspiration at the moment.

However, for every such interaction, there is probably 10x or more low-quality contributions.

And I don't mean low-quality because the contributor is missing technical knowledge, but low-quality because motivation was never right: no real interest for the project, focus instead being on merging the PRs for the sake of merging them, to pump up the author's GitHub account or CV with the proof of contributing to popular open-source repos, or to win some kind of award (e.g. during Hacktoberfest).

What I find most demotivating regarding such low-quality interactions is that when I see a new PR, I can't help but get excited: maybe this is a "good" one, the one where rich, inspiring interaction will happen. But what most likely follows is a dissapointment, and this is a part of what grinds the open-source maintainers down with time.

The main thing that changed for worse recently though, with the rise of AI, is that it became very easy to create open-source contributions that look good at first, but there is no real substance or quality behind them.

Before, one could quickly assess the PR for quality: if it looked complex and good, the person behind it for sure had to put the effort and obtain a certain level of understanding of the codebase and the subject matter.

Effort was put in, so you didn't feel bad putting effort from your side also, while reviewing it.

Now, you often just can't know till you dive in deeper.

Good example is Craig's contribution of a Latex document with the new formal grammar for Wasp that I mentioned above.

When Craig submitted that in 2021, I didn't think twice about investing a whole week of my own time to be able to review that PR properly. I was brimming with excitement. Even though I knew nothing about Craig.

Today, if I received such a contribution, my first assumption would be that it was AI generated, with no deep understanding of the matter by the author. And I wouldn't dare invest a week, or even a day of my own time, to evaluate it. And to be clear, it's not even about purely evaluating the correctness of the submitted work: maybe it is correct, maybe it works well, maybe it is even well designed. The problem is, I can't rely on the person behind it. I can't hope that there will be a rich, fulfilling cooperation coming out of this, resulting in new ideas, in growing together, creating something together. And if not, if the whole contribution is primarily AI driven, then what is the point? I can do it myself when I decide I want to tackle it without understanding, prompt my own AI, likely with a better prompt and better context.

This sucks. It sucks that my first assumption on seeing a contribution is that it is AI generated, and I wish it wasn't so, but that is how it is at the moment. It sucks for the maintainers, and it also sucks for the honest contributors that are putting in the real work.

What can one do then, as a new contributor to an open-source project, to surpass this?

It comes down to a single thing, which is building trust .

Before, that was relatively easy: a well-crafted, quality PR would get you a long way.

Today, more is needed, and I will give some ideas below on how to do this, that would do it for me as an open-source maintainer.

Be an honest human and treat others as such.

This is it really. It was...