Keep your issues to yourself

Recently, Taylor Otwell, the cult leader lead maintainer behind the Laravel framework announced that their open source libraries would be closing their GitHub issues on almost all of their repositories. (Though seemingly excluding the main framework, for now) I can’t put into words how shortsighted I think this is. Otwell’s argument is that any developer can just use their AI agent to spin up a fix to any issue they encounter. He argues that it might not be perfect but still it documents the problem and that a proper fix can follow… you know, like an issue. I don’t like the precedence this sets that every programmer is obligated to start spending tokens (or indeed, use generative AI in the first place) to resolve an issue with code that isn’t theirs. Furthermore, how does said developer know upfront whether what they’ve encountered is actually a bug, a misunderstanding, or something that behaves that way for a reason? Are they expected to spend the time and resources building a fix to…