Pattern: 'Contributor Poker' — Open Source Projects Bet on People Over AI Code Volume

Loris Cro's Blog·medium signal

Zig's Loris Cro articulated a framework explaining why some projects ban AI contributions even when the code quality is acceptable: open-source maintainership is an iterated game where you invest review effort in contributors hoping they become trusted long-term maintainers. LLM-assisted contributors present a 'risk factor' because the codebase familiarity and post-merge responsibility that makes contributor poker profitable doesn't develop. This framework will likely spread to other projects that value contributor pipeline over code throughput — watch for similar policies in security-critical and systems-level projects.