2026-06-06 19:17 • 239 words

Building a browser is a gargantuan task, among the most interesting and promising projects in that space, is the Ladybird browser. The project recently went form a "contributions welcome" to "maintainers only" mode. In Changing How We Develop Ladybird they lay out as reason:

For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself.

AI tools have changed the economics of this very quickly. We use them ourselves every day, but a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds.

So the deluge of generated code that followed the appropriation and repackaging of the open source commons in form of generative models now clogs the capacities of project maintainers to review them. More gravely, as a second order effect, it also evaporates the norms and unwritten social contract that used to govern a lot of progress in software development in the previous decades.

As things that break are lagging indicators of changes, both in technical and in social systems and given the economic state of affairs, I do not think that we have reached the apex of breakages quite yet.