AI Contributions and Maintainer Load in Open Source

Welcome to Talk Python to Me.

Great to have you here, man.

Hi, Michael.

Thanks for having me and meeting you again after PyCon US last week.

We had a great time at PyCon.

I mean, I don't know how you feel about it, given all the work that you do.

I suspect you feel similarly.

But to me, PyCon is like my geek holiday.

It doesn't feel like work.

It's, it's like the reward for all the work of throughout the year.

Yeah.

Same for me.

It's very nice to meet in person all these people that you talk with during the year, and then finally, for a whole week, you can chat with them, uh, drink a beer together, or meeting also new, new people.

Yeah, absolutely.

It was tons of fun.

So we're gonna talk about...

Honestly, I think it's gonna be a fad, but we're gonna talk about this new fad called AI.

Probably, probably not gonna last, but in the meantime, it's, it's kind of a hot topic at the moment.

So we're gonna talk about AI, and specifically your talk from PyCon about the effect of AI on open source maintainers, which I think is a perspective that many people don't consider, right? There's, there was this graph from GitHub showing, saying like, "Look, we're really sorry that GitHub is down a lot lately," but here is the usage graph of GitHub, and it's, it did something like 12 times increase in activity-

Yes

... over a couple of months.

I don't know.

Which I'm not necessarily totally gonna give GitHub a pass on that.

I...

But it, it is a signal and an indicator of just how much, how much more the contributions, issues, pull requests are to GitHub.