> Then you’re maintaining a stack of patches on top of the upstream until the end of time

The linked article has an ambitious solution for that, in the form of this prompt to a coding agent harness:

  Set up a nightly cron job that
  executes the prompt: fetch upstream
  changes to the <software> and
  rebase all local changes on
  top of upstream. Check that the
  software works as intended and
  replace the current version.