AI Wants to Eat Your Project Backlog

You can clear the backlog of your open-source projects with AI now. It’s really great at reproducing bugs, implementing reasonable features, adding the tests you never had time to write, and responding to user issues that have been open forever. Copilot and I worked through a dozen projects in the Mongoid organization on two 4-hour bus rides to visit my son in college (go Lions!). I picked the work, questioned the implementations, reviewed the results, and merged changes. The agent did all the typing, archaeology, environment setup, and testing. The most satisfying result was an issue about MongoDB sharding that had been open since September 2013: mongoid-locker #19 reported that acquiring a lock failed on collections sharded by _id. The original discussion included “not sure how easy it will be to replicate that in a test environment”. That is exactly the kind of issue that becomes permanent. You need a MongoDB configuration server, a shard, replica sets, a router, the right…