First, I'll second that I've applied agentic LLMs to an open source project to fix bugs and forcibly coerce it to act in ways that the maintainer may or may not approve of. It has been remarkablely effective, so long as I'm willing to apply patches or maintain a fork of the project (trivial, since this particular open-source project is abandoned anyway).

That said, the act of doing this- using LLMs to dominate somebody's legitimately intelligent and unique work- feels not only discourteous, but worse, like it's a short-term solution.

I'm convinced that it's a short-term solution NOT because I don't think that LLMs can continuously maintain these projects, but because open-source itself is going to be clawed back. The raison d'être of open-source is personal pride, hiring, collaboration, enjoyment, trust, etc. These motivations make less sense in an LLM-fueled world.

My prediction is that useful and well maintained open-source projects like we're hijacking will become fewer and far between.