I created a semi-popular plotting library back in university. The project still seems to be mostly used in academia, so a lot of the PRs and issues were from students and researchers - people who mean well, but don't always produce the highest-quality bug reports or code.

Initially I put a lot of effort into looking into bugs and cleaning up PRs to incorporate the useful parts. But I hadn't had the energy to work on this project in years, and over time collected a backlog of hundreds of issues and dozens of PRs.

Inspired by the Artcraft suite, I finally took the plunge and decided to automate the whole process as an experiment. I wrote a set of guidelines that roughly match what i would personally care about in a PR, and handed over to claude. I intentionally didn't look at or second guess any the judgments it made.

And...now i'm convinced this is the future. All PRs are merged or declined, issues are triaged, bugs are investigated and fixed where possible. I spot-checked a few instances, and its way more polite and patient than i ever was. The code is reasonable as well.

Most people I've talked to seem to be worried that following this approach will turn projects into an unmaintainable mess, but I'm not really seeing it. I mean, sure, it will happen to some degree, but every other pre-AI project is also an unmaintainable mess to some degree.