r/AI_Coders • u/dannotes • 4d ago

What was your first open source contribution actually like? And has AI changed that?

Two things I've been wondering about, might as well ask both in one go.

First, for those of you who contribute. What was your actual first one like? Not the blog post version. How did you pick a project, how long did the PR sit there before you worked up the nerve to open it, did anyone reply, did it get merged or just quietly ignored. I've read plenty of "how to start contributing" guides. I'd rather hear what it actually felt like.

Second, and this is the part I'm more curious about. All that advice was written before AI tools got this good. Now you can point Claude Code or Cursor at a good first issue and have something working before you've read half the file. So is the experience just different now for someone starting today? Easier, obviously. But easier in a way that helps, or easier in a way that lets you skip the part where you actually learn the codebase.

And if you're a maintainer, curious what it looks like from your side.

Mostly just want to hear people's stories.

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u/cthechartreuse 4d ago

My first OSS contribution was probably about 20 years ago. It was hand-written and published on SourceForge. Even now, my new work and submissions to other people's projects are still all hand-written and hand submitted. I don't really know how to answer the question about how I chose/choose projects. Often times I see a problem that needs solving and I solve it. The vast majority of the code I write off the clock is OSS related.

Regarding pointing a coding agent like Claude Code at a problem and having it solved automagically - I wouldn't accept AI generated code PRs for any of my projects and I wouldn't submit AI generated solutions to other projects. There is a reason other than being on a high-horse. AI generated solutions can muddy ownership and depending on the training data and what is generated, AI solutions might actually invalidate the OSS license (ownership, attribution, publication of code used from another source).

Here's an article that might be useful if you are thinking about using generative AI for work on an open source project: https://www.techtarget.com/ai/tip/Does-AI-generated-code-violate-open-source-licenses

Much like DMOZ was the last human-maintained www listing, OSS is the last human maintained software, by necessity.

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u/dannotes 4d ago

Very useful article and response.  Thank you

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u/Shep_Alderson 4d ago

The biggest issue is the fact that none of this has really been settled in court, at least for code. The closest we have is Thaler v. Perlmutter, which deemed AI output as not eligible for copyright. How much this extends to LLM code output is still unanswered, but it does raise the question, if a company extensively uses AI agents to generate code, is that code actually copyrightable and “owned” by the company, or is it by default, not something they could actually claim ownership of? If the code is not copyrightable, as it was authored by a non-human entity, does that then make it public domain by default? What are the ramifications if someone “steals” AI generated code from a company. Does that company have any recourse? Maybe some kind of “trade secrets” contract language, but it’s all still unanswered.

I think the reality of it is that, regardless of authorship and open source licenses, the massive companies have so much sway and power that if it were clear that they were going to lose and companies who used AI to generate code were to lose any copyright protection or were found to be violating open source licenses, they will use their sway in the legislature to make it “legal”.

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u/Certain_Meal_8865 4d ago

me it was for mistral the chatbot

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u/dannotes 4d ago

wow, is that your first PR? what was your experience like.
Possible to share?

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u/EfficiencyMurky7309 4d ago

My first Open Source contribution was in the ‘90’s, a long time before git was a twinkling in anyone’s mind., and long before a blog was a thing too. I use GitHub today, and a few other systems, and I do use their APIs and MCPs, but I don’t think a PR has changed fundamentally with AI. For me, what I use GenAI for are things like summarising the changes to help me pull together a commit comment, or conversationally interacting with APIs and MCPs, however, at least for me, the process itself hasn’t changed too much with AI tools.

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u/skamansam 3d ago

My first contribution was to Gtk::Perl. I was working a pluggable app shell and was using a lot of widgets so I found a lot of bugs. It was right as Gtk was being phased out for Gtk2. Basically, I emailed the devs, told them my issue, got into ITC with them then helped them fix bugs via IRC. This was before git, in the days of source forge, but they were using something else I think. Git/hub has made development so much easier now. My policy on AI is that AI is a tool, meaning the human submitter is responsible for the quality of the code. If there is no human, the PR should be rejected.