I feel like the pattern here is donate compute, not code. If agents are writing most of the software anyway, why deal with the overhead of reviewing other people's PRs? You're basically reviewing someone else's agent output when you could just run your own.
Maintainers could just accept feature requests, point their own agents at them using donated compute, and skip the whole review dance. You get code that actually matches the project's style and conventions, and nobody has to spend time cleaning up after a stranger's slightly-off take on how things should work.
Well, it's not quite that easy because someone still has to test the agent's output and make sure it works as expected, which it often doesn't. In many cases, they still need to read the code and make sure that it does what it's supposed to do. Or they may need to spend time coming up with an effective prompt, which can be harder than it sounds for complicated projects where models will fail if you ask them to implement a feature without giving them detailed guidance on how to do so.
Definitely, but that's kind of my point: the maintainers are still going to be way better at all of that than some random contributor who just wants a feature, vibe codes it, and barely tests it. The maintainers already know the codebase, they understand the implications of changes, and they can write much better plans for the agent to follow, which they can verify against. Having a great plan written down that you can verify against drastically lowers the risk of LLM-generated code
You can do all the steps I mentioned as a random contributor. I've done it before. But I agree that donations are better than just prompting claude "implement this feature, make no mistakes" and hoping it one-shots it. Honestly, even carefully thought-out feature requests are much more valuable than that. At least if the maintainer vibe-codes it they don't have to worry that you deliberately introduced a security vulnerability or back door.
Or even more efficient: the model we already have. Donate money and let the maintainer decide whether to convert it into tokens or mash the keys themself.
The point isn't that agent output is magically better; it's that reviewing your own agent's output is way cheaper (intellectually) than reviewing a stranger's, because you've written the plan by yourself. And 'slop' is mostly what you get when you don't have a clear plan to verify against. Maintainers writing detailed specs for their own agents is a very different thing from someone vibe coding a feature request
You’re assuming that maintainers have a desire to use agentic coding in the first place.
Secondly, it would seem that such contributions would contribute little value, if the maintainers have to write up the detailed plans by themselves, basically have to do all the work to implement the change by themselves.
We've experienced something similar: for compute-heavy rendering tasks, AWS just wasn't good enough. EC2 machines with the same spec perform much worse than Hetzner machines
> EC2 machines with the same spec perform much worse than Hetzner machines
Yeah, even when you move to "EC2 Dedicated Instances" you end up sharing the hardware with other instances, unless you go for "EC2 Dedicated Hosts", and even then the performance seems worse than other providers.
Not sure how they managed to do so for even the dedicated stuff, would require some dedicated effort.
Maintainers could just accept feature requests, point their own agents at them using donated compute, and skip the whole review dance. You get code that actually matches the project's style and conventions, and nobody has to spend time cleaning up after a stranger's slightly-off take on how things should work.