When VoidZero joined Cloudflare, we committed $1 million to strengthen the open source ecosystem around Vite. Sponsoring open source has always mattered, but now AI has made funding urgent. AI is changing open source AI has made open source more valuable while triggering more maintainer burnout.
Previously, contributing to a project through either an issue or pull request meant you cared about it. In return, maintainers would review and provide feedback. AI changed the social contract of open source.
Anyone can now create and submit AI-authored pull requests. The most visible result is the influx of pull requests. As the number of PRs has gone up, the number of maintainers reviewing them has stayed constant. So each maintainer’s workload has grown.
