It's kinda surprising to me that even the people who are all in on ai haven't internalized that there's no inherent value in producing a big lump of code. They've massively decreased the work they put in but still expect the same pre-ai reaction/gratitude when submitting a big PR.

   "A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds."

On the other hand, while not accepting external code contributions will certainly improve their security posture it will also make it more difficult to identify who to invite to join the priesthood.

> Outside involvement still matters: clear bug reports

So I can find a bug, I can fix it, but I am not allowed to tell them how exactly I did it.

Instead they have to re-figure it out. The team must be thrilled to re-do work they know was already put in by others, repeatedly.

As a user-and-eveloper, why would I sink time into a project with such rules that put a barrier to improving my life with the software? It seems much easier to use Firefox or Chromium, where my fixes actually meet open ears.

It was very useful for me in the past when a new Chromium version crashed on my product, that I could go and suggest a fix to V8, and it was rolled out in the next Chromium release so my product worked again (https://github.com/v8/v8/commit/4f8a70adca01c). Without this, maybe Chromium developers would have never bothered to fix it because of lack of time to figure it out.

> a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it

Nobody should need to know anything about any person submitting a pull request. Hopefully whether code that makes it into Firefox or Chromium was never based on the "effort" or "faith" of the submitter, but based on the correctness of the code in review.

Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.

This holds true automatically: In any situation where it isn't, you can just write the code yourself and done.

As a project you can always ignore or close a PR you want to write yourself instead. But it seems unwise to bar yourself from the _option_ of reviewing an outside contribution, or using it as input for your own re-write.

An open-source projects losing the ability to find and mentor new maintainers is so disappointing.

I think the whole game of software engineering, open source or not, has completely changed. A lump of code doesn't mean or imply the same thing as it did 2 years ago.

(Servo is arguably in the middle, accepting outside contributions as long as you don't use AI.)

It's understandable that a team without much funding would have to close off contributions to spare on labor costs. But, it makes me feel that people don't give Google/Mozilla/Apple enough credit for the economic resources they put into enabling openness.

(Personal bias/experience alert: I'm currently retired, but formerly worked at Google on Chrome. I saw many of my coworkers nurture outside contributors, and did some of that myself, both informally and through programs like internships.)

Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the code contributions, but also massively impact the other, non-tangible contributions like ideas, eyes on code, etc. That feels way worse.

I'm conflicted, confused and afraid, HN. Look at what I just wrote, yet I use claude and deepseek and all the skills and complex harnesses and MCPs and whatnot... But all now seems like a transition phase. Transition to f-ing what though?

A lot of questions cannot be answered unless we dedicate a meaning to our lives. Human touch? Too late? Also: I liked a song and it was sonos. I unliked it after discovering. I feel so stupid, so often.

Sorry for the unhinged digression.

I love Ladybird (have a sticker on my laptop to prove!), I hope they thrive.

If AI is the problem, the solution would be introducing an AI policy, community trust management system or something like that. Definitely not a closed development process.

I think closing contributions (due) to AI will be looked at in a similar way. Forks open to AI will appear, and take over. And people will return to the open model. I think it needs more proliferation of AI coding and reviewing tools, so that AI contributions can be automatically independently reviewed for quality.

As far as I can tell, architecture, i.e. sound, precise definitions of exactly what a software artifact must do, is now critical. And with LLMs, it's now feasible to begin implementing such things, though many brownfield projects may be intrinsically unsound in ways that their creators are unaware of. In such a world, contributions simply require a modified proof that the software does what it must do, with perhaps additional claims that the maintainers provide.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_crisis

The elephant in the room is so many projects already operate like this without formally announcing it.

If you look at Blender, one of the biggest and most successful OSS projects out there, it's effectively run as source available. Some PRs make it through, but for the most part there have been heavy barriers to entry to get your work into the product. In this example, it's been key to such a large and complex project with millions of users staying afloat. It's an inconvenient truth.

It's one of those unspoken things in open source - the bigger the project the less you can accept or vet contributions. The less able you are to respond to users because there are too many. The amount of code you need to own balloons. The signal to noise to too much. LLMs have massively exacerbated this issue.

We usually call open source software without open collaboration source available software.

This is terrible news, defeating core beliefs people had in Ladybird. Not an open browser I wished for.

And then if someone wants to do a larger contribution, they could have a process like making an issue, discussing the approach and then collaborating with a maintainer to get it in.

Blocking public contributions means that they want to have complete control of the project and AI is likely a good excuse to do that.

Integrating some kind of proof-of-stake system might be a way forward for open source. Nobody wants to shuffle through a pile of low-quality PRs written by LLM.

Is this a sponsored project where maintainers are just hired?

I feel like 1/10 comment I make on HN are about this.

So merged PR were until LLMs a good proxy for the ability to code and contribute to a software project. Consequently they were used to estimate if a candidate was potentially good for a position. Merged PR on popular project were thus precious credentials one could "trade" for potential work. Since then the desire to provide PR changed from contributing to a project for its own sake, to make the actual project progress, to signalling.

A new proxy must be found to establish the ability to contribute to a project.

i feel like there should be a way to trust a PR ID verification or in-person verification at FOSDEM/DEFCON/Chaos Communication Congress,UNI's, for example.

This is probably the best, most succinct explanation of what we're seeing happening in the OS world right now.

Trust is key.

That way new contributors are forced to start small.

Yes, Ladybird is facing a wall of slop... no... A tsunami of slop overwhelms core maintainers. Probably safe to generalize to other popular open source projects.

The project is important and the code is beautiful! I spent many happy hours trying to understand the code, browser-specs and tried to adapt to their coding style. After 18 months I ended up with a few merged PRs. Some were pure joy to write. I got to work directly with most of their core maintainers in the review cycle. They're great!! From the outside, it seems like their responsiveness to submissions slowed down in the last few months... slop.

Of course, it would be great if there was another way, but here we are.

Love <3 to Andreas and the core maintainer group! Keep up the good fight! Maybe we'll meet again.

Think about it. Anthropic just reported that their codebase is now improving itself. We're moments away from every open source repo being able to do the same. Think of it like torrenting — you'll be able to open your repo to the public, and have a stream of code flow in from millions of contributors. More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days.

Ladybird doesn't know it yet, but they just left themselves in the dust.

Make a better Ladybird successfully to the point the original contributors take notice. If the barriers to doing that are truly lower, then it should be easier.

Feature requests are valuable because they tell you what users want.

Error reports are valuable because they tell you under which circumstances the code fails.

But the code that implements those features and fixes those errors can now be written by AI. AI follows all the rules for how code is supposed to be written in your project. Is already producing very high quality code. And soon it will produce a quality that no human can match.

They may, at this point, go ahead and remove "get involved" block from their website https://ladybird.org/, since it's not possible to contribute anymore.

This is the way to go to reduce supply chain vulnerabilities and to reduce time of mainters reviewing LLM slop.

Of course, if they are also concerned about the quality of external PRs then that does not help.

"green" and "the right artifact exists" drift apart faster than expected with more automation. exit code wasn't enough for us — had to make the output file the thing that proves a run happened.

Sometimes the discussions on PRs are equally valuable to see how a commit was arrived at, and I'd be sad if that got lost in this change.

We'll have more such disruptions and we'll learn to live with it.

It’s controversial to say, and I may be downvoted, but I’ll share this as a pov: OSS is essentially giving away our work for free. Did that ever really make sense? If it does, why don’t graphic designers give their work away for free? Why don’t authors do that? UX designers?

It’s a very peculiar thing to us nerds.

And the strangest thing is, we may have unwittingly built the data source required to make our skills redundant, as models are trained on the work we gave away for free.

I think this is an interesting narrative.

I guess it takes quite a lot of experience as a maintainer to realize that 'free' in 'free code contributions by strangers' is like 'free' in 'free puppy'.

Though in retrospect we should have seen it. It's been an angle of attack since forever, it only took a lot of effort.

And this we should have had already before AI.

I'm surprised this isn't yet a thing. Heck, this can be made independent of GitHub/Gitlab, like a portal which tracks your rep. Could also help you got hired. Think Stackoverflow rep mixed with LinkedIn but for actual code contribution.

Yes I'm aware it sounds Black Mirror-ish. But we need more meritocracy in the world of OS that is otherwise highly anonymous and with very little public authority.

What I realy want to know how sustainable a model like this is. How does one find new maintainers when old ones leave. When you cannot contribute anymore.

This is partly due to Ladybird building on low-level system-language primitives that make it harder to identify problems, and while they are porting to Rust it's not fair to say that C++ is single-handedly the cause of this, because regardless of the language, in a complicated interconnected codebase the complexity easily compounds. It's a real shame we don't have the option of a trust-graph filter stop-gap that can filter contributors with a social model of who is trusted for what, purely as a heuristic to reduce the risk of bad contributions (not as solid proof of soundness).

This whole situation shows the way that development has been done isn't nearly as transparent as just having the source code being available.

We haven't been able to say what we want the code to do in a way that can be tested robustly enough to make openly accepting contributions sustainable, and it's unfair to blame the team for that because on top of needing to develop and review their own changes, it's an incredibly difficult problem with only so many hours in the day. I hope we figure out the representation and social trust graph problems, and that people continue to build on their great work.

Bad actors pay good money for vulnerabilities and patient actors are invested in slowly introducing them. Agent loops like Codex or Claude, with Anthropic's Mythos model finding ~271 Firefox 0-days, and helping fix them shows both the problem and the promise.

It's bitter-sweet in a way that Ladybird is great at showing how the incidental complexity of web browsers could be vastly reduced. To protest being gagged, cryptographers made t-shirts with DeCSS DVD or RSA algorithms on them. Alan Kay suggests that t-shirt computing is actually a useful target, and STEPS by his Viewpoints Research Institute managed to really distill some parts of OS-level and desktop publishing software down into minimal, more understandable abstractions that encode the rules of the programs with more appropriate patterns for the problems at hand, that might more plausibly fit on a small wardrobe of t-shirts. Browsers really need this range of t-shirts making.

As a minority browser user (and someone wanting to build on them), I'm excited to see Ladybird get increasingly usable for real browsing, and I am hopeful that in time, the spec representation gaps, and social trust map heuristics are solvable problems that could restore the dream of open-source, or at least stop a trend of closing (with tldraw doing this much earlier, for a less risky but still thorny project).

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...

It's heartbreaking, my two favorite things about the internet are dying off because human interaction can't outscale AI slop.

they can vibe-code their own browser, there's no need for the public to access every single open-source project anymore, you need to find people you can actually trust

In this type of system, if I am competent and can contribute how to do I? By reviewing the maintainers PRs, helping fill out more info for bug reports / root causing?

There had to be some way for a competent user to get involved enough to become a familiar handle to the maintainers and be seen as a possible future maintainer/ expert contributor right?

Applies so, so widely. Glad they’re taking (very necessary) action here.

How is this the top post on my favorite website?

> For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself.

The solution, IMO, is a strictly worse version than what we chose in the Zig project (banning LLM contributions).

> AI tools have changed the economics of this very quickly. We use them ourselves every day, but a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds.

Things that worry me about this choice:

- open source is a tough business and you need to leverage the good things about it to make it worth doing. contributors bring in a huge amount of value that they offer you essentially for free (see contributor poker: https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/), on top of being a hugely valuable recruitment funnel. They're rejecting all of that, which seems insane to me.

- one could argue that LLMs could fill that gap but, first of all they could have just banned LLM usage only in PRs from untrusted contributors, and second even the best LLM: 1. is a cost, not just free value, and the price of tokens is increasing 2. the code has to be reviewed anyway, unless you think that just passing tests is good enough for a browser 3. ultimately can't become a trusted core contributor able of taking ownership of a part of the codebase

- removing the influx of code that comes from PRs means that over time the whole project will have a small number of contributors that own all the code, making it easier for the project to do a license rugpull. when copyright ownership is well distributed this kind of thing is harder to pull off.

Overall, this is not good in my opinion. They're making open source a more problematic business model for them than it has to be, while at the same time making it harder to recruit more core contributors, as the code ownership coalesces to small group of people.

This is an obvious recipe for disaster (a rugpull), and I'm forced to wonder if this is just by mistake or if some of the Ladybird sponsors are playing a mean game of Secret Hitler. I guess only time will tell.

Then the linux kernel is doomed. /s

Also, as I have pointed out before, they seem to develop too slowly for a solid beta this year. You only have to look at the issue tracker and check for URLs not working or even crashing the browser. Ladybird may have gotten better in the last months, but imagine if 50.000 people are using it, you will see more bugs. How do they then handle bug reports?