FT: AI Coding Boom Is Overwhelming Open-Source Maintainers

The [Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/b7f62212-989e-412f-b76a-6905b6333afd) has a piece out arguing that the AI coding boom is quietly draining the open-source ecosystem that most of the boom actually runs on. The framing is a tragedy of the commons: a developer using a coding assistant gets faster, the maintainer on the other end of the pull request gets a larger pile of superficially plausible, low-context contributions to triage, and nobody is paying them for that extra work. The evidence sits on the maintainer side, and it is now concrete. Daniel Stenberg shut down cURL's six-year bug bounty program earlier this year after roughly $86,000 in payouts, with valid submissions dropping to about 5% as AI-generated reports climbed. Mitchell Hashimoto's Ghostty banned AI-generated code submitted without approval, with Hashimoto insisting the line 'is not an anti-AI stance' but 'an anti-idiot stance.' Steve Ruiz's tldraw went further and now auto-closes all external pull requests. RedMonk analyst Kate Holterhoff has been calling the pattern 'AI Slopageddon' in [her own writing](https://redmonk.com/kholterhoff/2026/02/03/ai-slopageddon-and-the-oss-maintainers/). The research the reporting leans on is a Central European University and Kiel Institute for the World Economy paper titled ['Vibe Coding Kills Open Source'](https://arxiv.org/html/2601.15494v1). It models what happens when AI agents assemble applications by pulling in open-source packages without any of the follow-on engagement — documentation reads, issue reports, upstream contributions — that historically compensated maintainers through visibility, sponsorships and consulting work. Productivity rises for the AI user; maintainer incentives fall, and the pipeline of serious new contributors thins alongside them. As proof points, coverage cites Stack Overflow activity dropping about 25% within six months of ChatGPT's launch, and Tailwind CSS documentation traffic falling 40% while revenue declined 80%.