I've always found it difficult to break into medium and large sized opensource projects, because it takes so long. In one of my jobs, I worked with someone who knew the maintainer in one of the areas, and I realized that social coding is basically an uphill battle, unless you have a real life social connection.
"Social Coding" was dead the moment LLMs showed emergent programming capabilities. This is the remaining communities attempting to defend themselves from the hordes of low effort slop coders.
From first principles a community that relied on high friction knowledge attainment as the barrier to entry does not survive contact with LLMs. That extends far beyond "programming" as well.
We're seeing the death of people writing code. There's no reason for a human to care about what the computer executes, as long as it does the right thing, so why would anyone care about reviewing the code?
Coding is turning into burger flipping -- you ask the computer to do something, then you do a bunch of manual testing. There's a little bit of jargon needed to ask for the right thing, but it's closer to flipping burgers than it is to rocket science.
