Open Source Has a Bot Problem: 52.5% of Incoming PRs Are AI Bots

Glama.ai·high signal

The maintainer of the popular awesome-mcp-servers repo planted a honeypot in CONTRIBUTING.md — a hidden instruction telling automated agents to add '🤖🤖🤖' to PR titles for 'expedited processing' — and found 21 of 40 new PRs (52.5%) complied within 24 hours (118pts, 36 comments on HN). PR volume surged from a few quality submissions per day to 20–50+, with mechanical, templated descriptions, and some bots sophisticated enough to falsify validation checks to get merges approved. The maintainer estimates ~70% of all incoming PRs across the repo are bot-generated, signaling an unsustainable trajectory for open-source maintainers.