github.blog
Record growth is healthy, if it's...
Excerpt
This makes it harder than ever to maintain projects and make sure they continue moving forward in the intended direction. Auto-generated issues and pull requests increase volume without always increasing the quality of the project. As a result, maintainers need to spend more time reviewing contributions from developers with vastly variable levels of skill. In a lot of cases, the amount of time it takes to review the additional suggestions has risen faster than the number of maintainers. … ## Record growth is healthy, if it’s planned for On the surface, record global growth looks like success. But this influx of newer developers can also be a burden. The sheer popularity of projects that cover basics, such as contributing your first pull request to GitHub, shows that a lot of these new developers are very much in their infancy in terms of comfort with open source. There’s uncertainty about how to move forward and how to interact with the community. Not to mention challenges with repetitive onboarding questions and duplicate issues.
Related Pain Points
Maintainers overwhelmed by low-quality AI-generated contributions
7The surge of auto-generated issues and pull requests from AI tools has created a denial-of-service-like attack on human attention. Maintainers face a high-volume flood of low-quality, inaccurate 'AI slop' contributions that consume reviewer time without proportional project benefit, while the maintainer pool has not grown to match.
Duplicate issues proliferate due to poor discoverability
5GitHub's issue creation flow doesn't encourage or enforce searching for existing issues, and contribution guidelines are rarely read, resulting in large volumes of duplicate issues that waste maintainer time asking for consolidation.