I think this is the key point.

A few years ago, if I send a complex PR that compiles and passes tests, that implies a certain amount of time and cognitive investment on my part. It seems likely that I wouldn't invest that if I didn't also understand the codebase, the feature or bug I'm working on, etc.

Now, that understanding is roughly as expensive as before, but AI has vastly reduced the cost of generating the code that compiles and passes tests.

Probably-well-intentioned community members are happy to contribute the cheap thing( Claude Code tokens) but, because it's so cheap, it's not a good indicator they've contributed the expensive thing (human understanding).

> If most of the pull-requests were AI-coded, well, the maintainers are equally capable of prompting Claude Code themselves.

I see this position a bit: the notion that AI-generated code has no value. I think it's easy to generate zero-value code, but I don't agree that all AI-generated code is zero-value. I've been working on my side projects in OpenCode, and I spend quite a bit of time prompting, setting up the right files, descriptions of the product I'm trying to build, and the roadmap for it. I have a tight validation loop that lets me run through a bunch of automated checks after each change, and then I do a bunch of manual testing through edge cases that the generated feature might screw up, and then I iterate. It's a different kind of work, but I can make progress more quickly than I could coding by hand. Validation loops are the main critical component.

My experience doing this over the past months is that using AI to code is a skill, and I learn new techniques and get better at it as I try stuff. But that also suggests that, when done well, it can produce something of value.

All of this is to say: while I take issue with your first sentence, I completely agree with your second sentence. What we've lost is the ability to distinguish easily between something well-thought out and something generated thoughtlessly. Focusing on cheap validation would help here immensely, as well.

The code just isn’t the main effort of work anymore. Anyone can generate the implementation, so it makes more sense than ever to instead hammer out the what, why, and how that underlies any code change.

I see all projects moving this direction. Makes more sense to hash out a plan together.

As they say, just send me the prompt instead, at least that's more useful.

> the maintainers are equally capable of prompting Claude Code themselves

I'm 100% on the side of maintainers here, but this is BS. If you could "just prompt Claude yourself" the AI productivity boosts would be in hundreds if not thousands of percent, which is demonstrably and self-evidently not the case (at least as of June 2026).

yeah but they could get free token usage from the community

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