Now Closed 😴 AMA with Maintainers (OpenClaw, Kubernetes, Homebrew and more...)

Welcome, welcome!

We’re hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with open source maintainers here on GitHub Community part of Maintainer Month this May.

This AMA is now opened from Wednesday, 27 May 8am PT to 1pm 2pm PT. Drop by, ask questions, read along, and upvote questions that interest you. ⬆️

The Maintainers 👑

• @angiejones from Agentic AI Foundations
• @camilamaia from ScanAPI
• @MikeMcQuaid from Homebrew
• @mrbobbytables from Kubernetes
• @vincentkoc from OpenClaw

Need inspiration for a question? Here are a few ideas: how has maintaining changed over the years, what contributor interactions are actually helpful, how AI is affecting day-to-day work, what burnout looks like, how decisions get made, or how can people encourage their companies to support open source contributions?

Hot topic: AI-generated contributions
One of the most common themes we've been hearing from maintainers is the surge in low-quality contributions that may not add any value to a project, but consume enormous amounts of maintainer time. We're actively working on tools to give maintainers more control: per-repo limits on concurrent open PRs and Issues from unknown contributors, contributor allowlists to bypass these limits, and global rate limits to catch users who spray multiple repositories at once. Feel free to chat with maintainers to understand what strategies they've adopted to handle AI slop entering their repos, or how/if they plan on leveraging some of these new tools.

No presentations or formal agenda. We'll focus on a conversation with maintainers from different projects and ecosystems. ❤️

Although Maintainer Month 2026 has almost wrapped up, you can still explore the conversations, stories, and events that took place throughout May. Check out some Maintainer Month resources here:

• Welcome to Maintainer Month blog post
• Maintainer Month website: including event schedule, library of resources and love letters. 💌
• Apply to the Maintainer Community

#MaintainerMonth

Note

The GitHub Community team is here to help guide the conversation only and keep it focused on maintainers and their projects. If comments become disruptive, harassing, or pull focus away from maintainers and their projects we may step in to redirect the comments and moderate in line with the GitHub Community Code of Conduct. ✨

[ashleywolf]

What’s your favorite thing about open source?

[camilamaia]

+1 for the community!

The community itself is already amazing, but also everything that comes with it: learning opportunities, friendships, collaboration, mentorship, career growth, and the feeling of building something meaningful together.

[MikeMcQuaid]

Not having a "boss" so no-one can tell me what to do 😁

https://mikemcquaid.com/open-source-maintainers-owe-you-nothing/

Maintainers don't owe anyone anything. We can do what we want. We don't have to fix bugs from people who are rude. We don't have to make releases, have CI, etc.

[vincentkoc]

The community, people are in it for a ton of reasons and its the community aspect that drives open-source that keeps me pushing for more. I wrote my response before I read the others can cant agree more.

[PrishaTHE-PRO]

I like that open source software offers a level of flexibility and customization that proprietary software often cannot match

[kevinslin]

Its been said by others but definitely community is highest on the list. With community, you get direct feedback, support, and gratification that what you're working on is benefiting real people

[moraesc]

What's something you have to do on a daily basis as a maintainer that people may not know about? Is there any behind the scenes work that you find really rewarding?

[MikeMcQuaid]

What's something you have to do on a daily basis as a maintainer that people may not know about?

Read lots of emails (I still use GitHub email notifications) 😅

Is there any behind the scenes work that you find really rewarding?

My favourite is working with early-career engineers who do their first programming in open source and to see them get full-time jobs in the tech industry later 😍

[egelhaus]

I would say triaging issues / bug reports opened by our users, and reading E-Mails either sent to me directly (mostly spam) or sent by the GitHub email notifications 😅

[vincentkoc]

Tons of admin, every project has an ugly part beyond the PR's. This can be everything from dealing with community complexities, conflict on public direction like PRs and Issues but also all the tons of messages and things like security advisories behind the scenes that many are not exposed to.

[kevinslin]

A lot of work goes into managing community. Public channels, private DMs, github issues and PRs...
I think people are aware of this but might not be aware of how large of a role this can consume. I spend at least an hour or two on community related issues per day - for large communities like openclaw, this could easily consume the entire day

[samus-aran]

Totally optional, but can you share a moment/experience from your open source career that reminded you why you do this work?

[MikeMcQuaid]

Whenever I meat meet someone in meatspace real life and they say "you work on Homebrew? that saves me so much time!" 🫶

[camilamaia]

There are many moments like this, but these are two that came to my mind right now:

• When people tell me they got a job because they used ScanAPI to test their APIs during hiring challenges, or because contributing to the project helped them grow professionally.
• When I’m interviewing for a job and the interviewers already know ScanAPI. It’s such a surreal feeling to realize that something you built in open source has actually reached and helped people far beyond your own circle.
• When contributors from completely different countries collaborate naturally as if they’ve known each other for years.

[mrbobbytables]

I have several related moments -
Whenever I see someone I've mentored grow into a leadership position. Several I've taken under my wing have grown from new contributor -> org member -> maintainer -> project leader; and some have even taken over my own role so that I could step down. :D

[vincentkoc]

Few times, once when a project I loved let me take over the project as I wanted to keep it alive and the same when I gave a project to someone else. The projects lived on, it continued to serve the needs of that community, it stayed alive beyond my needs.

[kevinslin]

Meeting people IRL tell me that they've used something I've built and gotten value out of it

[v-coder247]

As an open source maintainer, what's the scariest incident that you have had to attend to? 🫢

[Ileriayo]

This happened on the Kubernetes project????

When a co-maintainer accidentally wiped out the main branch with a force push. 🙃 We were able to recover pretty quickly and in the end we did discover that our branch protection rules were not being enforced when we all though they were.

[egelhaus]

When a co-maintainer accidentally wiped out the main branch with a force push. 🙃 We were able to recover pretty quickly and in the end we did discover that our branch protection rules were not being enforced when we all though they were.

This is a motivation for me to check my branch protection rules 🤣

[mrbobbytables]

This happened on the Kubernetes project????

Not to kubernetes/kubernetes - but another repo^^;;;

[MikeMcQuaid]

I wish I could tell you about the scariest ones 😅.

https://brew.sh/2018/08/05/security-incident-disclosure/ and https://brew.sh/2021/04/21/security-incident-disclosure/ are two relatively major ones thankfully with no user impact on either occasion.

[vincentkoc]

Waking up to 200+ security advisories on OpenClaw, most are AI slop but in there there are some real ones so all of these need to be treated with the same dillgence. But honestly having been in tech for years and years nothing in enterprises wont happen in open-source but everything you do in opensource is out in the public domain and often cant be taken back.

[helen]

What does being a contributor mean to you as a maintainer, and what qualities do you look for beyond the code when considering contributions?

[MikeMcQuaid]

Contributors, to me, are people who successfully submit a pull request to the project.

As well as the code: I look at people who are responsive, kind and prioritise maintainers' time over their own.

[angiejones]

For me, a contributor is someone who commits to the project in a meaningful way. it's not limited to code. I ❤️ docs contributors and wish there were more. Same for testers. I also acknowledge community builders as contributors. It takes much more than good code to run a successful project.

[vincentkoc]

People that can quantify the impact of the pr/issue it has on them, articulating thier pain or fustration to give maintainers context. Often this is missed.

[kevinslin]

Today, its folks that have taken time on the issue vs just having an agent auto post a PR. This means giving good context for why the change was needed and having done some diligence on how their changes fit into the existing project architecture

[egelhaus]

What measurements / solutions do you use, to check for slop / AI quality with PRs?

[MikeMcQuaid]

People who haven't filled out the templates are normally a good sign. We have a bot automatically close them.

Please steal our code: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/028c262da5446fdd6fb7711c91480d0f0b6fe405/.github/workflows/incomplete-prs.yml

As far as solutions go, if it seems like I'm speaking to a human, I don't do detailed review but instead ask them to do things like e.g. slim the diff or explain their changes. If they can't/won't/I'm talking to an AI, I close and move on with my life.

[vincentkoc]

At OpenClaw we developed various approaches and our own tooling like ClawSweeper https://github.com/openclaw/clawsweeper (MIT Licenced)

[angiejones]

I have an agent check it honestly lol. Automatically runs on every PR. Saves me a lot of time and frustration. If it's a well meaning contributor, they will have already cleaned up the slop (with the agent's help/feedback) before I even come to review.

[mrbobbytables]

Funny enough, for Kubernetes since we require contributors to sign a CLA...which has pretty much been the easy indicator for AI slop or not. The people doing all sorts of drive bys never sign the CLA, or repeat opening/closing PRs with never signing it. 😆

[kevinslin]

Personal skills that check for correctness and SLOP. Run it on my own code as well as external code

[Paullyoung]

Thank you for taking the time to answer questions in this AMA, you all are very busy so it is appreciated!

The question I had is how or do you prioritize efficiency of your projects (improvements to minimize the compute used - especially when others run your project)?

There is a connection between efficiency and environmental sustainability which is very important for many folks (using less compute for the same job = less energy use and related carbon emissions).

Are there things you are doing to make your efficiency work easier or are there other blockers or priorities taking time away? Would love to understand how GitHub and others in the community could help you and your teams tackle this. Thanks again for your help!

[MikeMcQuaid]

We have a brew prof command that files up various profilers to spit out performance information for optimisation. In general we just try to keep speeding things up and pay attention to when things "feel slow".

How can you help? PRs welcome 😁

[vincentkoc]

Short awnser its very very hard to balance performance (accuracy) vs speed vs cost (resources/spend/efficency).

Usually the focus of most projects is ensuring things work, and that may not be the most performant.

Over optimizing for performance is an art without breaking things.

[nityaa3009]

Hi, there! 💖
As someone new to the OSS ecosystem, what are some of the best practices to get started with your first PR? I get really overwhelmed with the amount of repos and projects available pertinent to the stack I'm familiar with, and it gets confusing to find a starting point!

Also, what's a good first issue/PR that y'all have come across?

Thankyou :))

[angiejones]

I encourage folks to contribute to projects they actually use. What's a bug you've run into, or tiny quality of life improvement. Start there.

[vincentkoc]

Do something you care about or passionate about, this can be a project you care about and use alot, or a feature/bug that fustrates you. Explain and give context, say its your first PR. If you want to fix issues you can find projects that have "good first issue" tag on issues to guide newbies.

[MikeMcQuaid]

agree with @angiejones and @vincentkoc!

when I got started we used to talk about "scratching your own itch"; finding a problem that really annoys you with a tool you use and working on fixing it yourself. I actually think "start with a small/simple PR" is less motivating than starting with something you actually care about.

[kevinslin]

Echo other maintainers. Most folks doing open source for the "right reasons" end up doing it because they care about what they're working on. On getting started - if the project has a community forum (eg. discord), would recommend joining and posting in there once you've identified something to work on

[MetzinAround]

Thanks for this AMA, y'all. Can you tell me if there was a moment for you when you realized your project "made it"? A moment where you realized this thing you were building was suddenly bigger than you realized?

[vincentkoc]

You find your project being discussed in random forums or people mention it you and you can be like "hey thats me!"

[MikeMcQuaid]

When I saw my code running in an Apple keynote:

[kevinslin]

when your mother has heard about it

[angiejones]

When the project moved to the Linux Foundation 🙌🏽

[v-ember]

Hey 👋
Two questions 😉 :

What has been the most positive impact of AI on your contributor community so far?

Have you noticed any shift in the quality of contributions since AI tools became more widely used?

[angiejones]

Our project is an agent harness, one of the very first ones in fact. So, it gives the community an opportunity to shape what agentic AI should look like. The project was launched last year and has 500+ contributors. Features that the community built into this project shaped what an agent can be.

Outside of that, in general, I think AI has afforded many more people to contribute who would not been able to before. Our project is in Rust and yet you don't necessarily need to know rust in order to contribute. With the help of an AI agent, people who have a desire to help can do so.

Quality of PRs was low originally. But as the models improved and we invested in preparing our repo for AI contributions, it's much much better now.

[camilamaia]

Hi @v-ember!

My experience so far:

1. One of the most positive impacts, in my perspective so far, has been lowering the barrier to entry for new contributors. People who were previously afraid of contributing because of language barriers or lack of confidence now feel more comfortable asking questions, understanding codebases, and submitting their first PRs.

2. There are definitely more contributions overall now, both good and bad. But at the same time, maintenance and reviews became way more demanding too. So we basically ended up using even more AI tools to help maintainers review AI-assisted contributions, which is kind of a funny loop when you think about it. That said, I honestly can't say for sure that the overall quality decreased in numbers 🤷‍♀️. I think what changed the most was the volume and the variety of contributions we receive.

[v-ember]

😅 @camilamaia That AI-to-review-AI loop is such an interesting dynamic.

[v-ember]

@angiejones Love the investment in preparing the repo for AI contributions 🍾 That definitely helps build confidence for first-time contributors.

[MikeMcQuaid]

AI's impact has been slightly positive. We get more high-quality PRs than before (though the average quality of PRs has got worse). For me and some other maintainers: it's hugely increased our output without a huge increase in defects. This is my workflow in case anyone is curious: https://mikemcquaid.com/sandboxed-agent-worktrees-my-coding-and-ai-setup-in-2026/

AI contributions are pretty variable. Some seem great and I'm dealing with a passionate responsive human who talks to me rather than through their AI. Some just feel like a shit version of my own AI prompts. In those cases, I'd rather close and do it myself.

[moraesc]

How would you guide someone who wants to start contributing to your project? Some projects are removing the good-first-issue labels to avoid bots from mass generating PRs targeting those PRs. Are there alternative ways you'd recommend becoming a part of the community aside from opening a PR (e.g. getting involved in a discord channel, commenting on issues, opening a discussion, etc..) ?

[MikeMcQuaid]

Opening a PR is the best way in our case. We provide some relatively simple onramps here: https://github.com/homebrew/brew#contributing

Our project would always rather discuss a PR than e.g. an issue about a potential PR.

[angiejones]

I prefer opening a PR. when people come and ask "how can we help", I'm usually like "hey, welcome. we have 100+ issues in the backlog. jump in!"

[mrbobbytables]

I had a long tweet thread awhile back on tips with getting started with contributing to a project and the advice is still pretty much the same^^;;

copied over:

1. People are much more willing to help you if you demonstrate that you’ve spent time looking at the project first; show you’ve made SOME investment first..like did you look at the contributor guide and the other basics. Maintainers are already strapped for time and There’s a big difference between “Hey, I want to contribute” vs. “I’ve read the contributor guide and got my environment setup. I’ve found an , but have a few questions about how works, can anyone help?” That sort of dovetails into my 2nd tip.
2. Start with a thing you KNOW, or have a good idea you can do. If you can, pick something you’re passionate about. Flex your experience. I have had dozens of people reach out to me about taking on an issue or getting involved in the most complex and difficult parts of the project without understanding the fundamentals of the project. It just leads to a lot of frustration from both you and the maintainer(s) that you engage.
3. Take the time to learn the basics of git. You will have a MUCH better time if you are familiar with general PR based workflow, branching, squashing and rebasing. You don’t have to be able to do them without looking up a reference, but know what they are and when they should be used.
4. If you open a PR, give it a little time before asking for reviews. Some projects have weekly triage meetings where they go through all open PRs. MANY projects are global and span multiple time zones, not to mention there’s still a good chunk of folk that don’t or can’t work on it during working hours. Now, it shouldn’t linger open forever, but take a look at some of the other PRs and get an idea of the general time it takes folks to respond before you start pinging people. The maintainers will appreciate it.

There are a few others in that tweet thread, but it really boils down to being intentional. If you show that you are invested and committed and do your research before getting engaged, you will have a much better time.

[ebndev]

As a Community Manager, I'm curious: have you ever changed your mind on a feature because of community feedback? What made that feedback effective?

[angiejones]

All the time, but it's usually a bulk of feedback. We use tools to aggregate community feedback so we can see what are widespread sentiment vs just one user's opinion.

[MikeMcQuaid]

All the time. Both volume (many people asking for things) and sometimes one person being politely persuasive.

[camilamaia]

Same here! ⬆️

[MatteoGabriele]

First, a huge thank you to all the maintainers here for taking the time today.
My question is really for anyone reading. How are other maintainers actually coping with the surge in AI-generated contribution spam, and do you feel the platform is moving fast enough to help?

How much of your week is now just triaging PRs with zero context, auto-generated comments, duplicate work, or broken CI from what are clearly automated agents and stats farmers? Have any of you had to resort to contribution guidelines warnings, closing repos to outside contributions, or just auto-closing anything that smells like an agent?

What does it say about the state of open source when maintainers are forced to build their own defenses against tooling the platform itself is actively promoting? The burden feels almost entirely offloaded onto the people with the least time to carry it

[angiejones]

Many of us are dealing with this. My project chose to embrace it. I've written a bit on how we've done that.

[MatteoGabriele]

Thank you for sharing your point of view. To me, the article reads a little like responding to global warming by building wider roads for cars and buying an air conditioner.
By accepting this as the new normal, we may be opening the gates wider, making it even harder for real contributors to be heard, and slowly turning open source into a place that works better for automated agents than for people.

[samus-aran]

🎉 Thanks so much to everyone who joined today’s AMA. We extended the discussion a little longer, and we’re closing it now for the day. We really appreciate everyone who took part, and we hope to organise another one again soon. 🚀

Huge awesome thanks to our maintainers 👏 💖