Part Man, Part Machine, All Open Source

Russell Spitzer, PMC member on several Apache projects, on open source and AI -- specifically on how LLMs changed the way he works, opening with the complaint that they ruined Advent of Code for him. He walks through the blog posts that measured it: in 2024 Claude 3.5 Sonnet solved about eighty per cent of the first ten days, the easier half of the calendar. What that shift means for maintainers of open-source projects, and what he now asks of a pull request -- not the prompt, but a clear summary of why the problem matters, what solving it is worth, and what the impact will be on other users of the project.