The impersonal AI advantage

TL;DR Open source projects that I contribute to have adopted AI bots to ease the pull request (PR) process. It might just be me (though I doubt it), but somehow it feels less like a personal attack when a bot tells you what’s wrong with your PR than when it’s a person doing it. This is likely a multiple win for maintainers – less toil, fewer confrontations, and thus more precious attention to focus on making their project better. Easier to swallow I love open source, and it’s been my honour to contribute to many of the projects I admire over the years. But contributing can be a difficult and fractious process, especially for a first time contributor to a mature project. Maintainers may have spent years establishing their project culture – ‘how things work around here’, and that doesn’t necessarily get completely captured in contributing.md. They also know their way around the code to an extent that a less involved contributor never will. Somebody (like me) shows up eager to make…