TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases.
This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code.
That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.
I don’t really care about this copyright argument, open source code copyright has always been a battle. I think the better “hollowing out” argument is burnout:
“here’s my 10k line PR that Claude helped me write, I pinkie promise that I reviewed it all myself”.
Bruh, I glaze over reviewing a 1k line PR, never mind 10k, ain’t no way you reviewed it yourself and now I have to?!