I recently stepped down from the core team of an open source project. There were various factors that lead to that, but LLMs were one of the factors that contributed to the decision. They are one of the things that has lead to me getting less enjoyment out of working on the project over the last year or so.
In a worst-case scenario, LLMs make it much more possible for someone to generate a large and plausible looking "contribution" with very little investment of effort on their side and minimal understanding of the problem they're trying to "solve". But your time as a maintainer is still finite. If you as a maintainer take every submission at face value as a good faith contribution, then you can easily put a lot of time and effort into the review of these contributions. That can come at the expense of spending that time on higher value activities. In the case where someone has chanced a low-effort LLM submission there is a higher chance that you're going to spend time and effort reviewing this thing, and then the original submitter will just close the PR or ghost when they realise it is more complicated than they thought. You can also end up wasting time on LLM written issues that contain a plausible looking detail that turns out to be spurious.
IMO there is a big difference in the impact LLMs have on software developed by a closed group of contributors (e.g: a team within a company) and open contribution projects. LLMs massively increase the ability of time wasters to submit plausible looking but low effort spammy issues/PRs. This is less of a problem in a high-trust environment. You are not usually trying to protect yourself from spammers and scammers within your own team so you're likely to see more of the benefits of LLMs there and less of the downsides. Conversely, you'll be exposed to those downsides more in a big open contribution bazaar style project where you accept contributions from world+dog.
That is not to say that LLMs have no benefits. Maybe all of this is a problem that will be solved over time. I will still continue to publish and maintain some smaller things, but I think right now is a very bad time to be a maintainer of a large open contribution project.
I recently stepped down from the core team of an open source project. There were various factors that lead to that, but LLMs were one of the factors that contributed to the decision. They are one of the things that has lead to me getting less enjoyment out of working on the project over the last year or so.
In a worst-case scenario, LLMs make it much more possible for someone to generate a large and plausible looking "contribution" with very little investment of effort on their side and minimal understanding of the problem they're trying to "solve". But your time as a maintainer is still finite. If you as a maintainer take every submission at face value as a good faith contribution, then you can easily put a lot of time and effort into the review of these contributions. That can come at the expense of spending that time on higher value activities. In the case where someone has chanced a low-effort LLM submission there is a higher chance that you're going to spend time and effort reviewing this thing, and then the original submitter will just close the PR or ghost when they realise it is more complicated than they thought. You can also end up wasting time on LLM written issues that contain a plausible looking detail that turns out to be spurious.
IMO there is a big difference in the impact LLMs have on software developed by a closed group of contributors (e.g: a team within a company) and open contribution projects. LLMs massively increase the ability of time wasters to submit plausible looking but low effort spammy issues/PRs. This is less of a problem in a high-trust environment. You are not usually trying to protect yourself from spammers and scammers within your own team so you're likely to see more of the benefits of LLMs there and less of the downsides. Conversely, you'll be exposed to those downsides more in a big open contribution bazaar style project where you accept contributions from world+dog.
That is not to say that LLMs have no benefits. Maybe all of this is a problem that will be solved over time. I will still continue to publish and maintain some smaller things, but I think right now is a very bad time to be a maintainer of a large open contribution project.