A Greptile analysis of openclaw/openclaw, briefly the fastest-growing repository on GitHub, charts what happens when AI coding agents are pointed at open source: pull requests jumped from two a week last December to 3,400 a week by February.
As the volume climbed, the merge rate fell from roughly 48% to under 9.3%. Much of the flood was agent-generated slop. One contributor opened 106 pull requests in a single day, a median of three seconds apart; four people independently submitted PRs with the identical title adding SearXNG as a search provider. The project's answer was Vouch, a trust system where unvouched users simply cannot contribute.
Greptile's analogy is the early-2000s email spam wave, when the cost of sending approached zero. If contribution is now that cheap, reputation and trust graphs, rather than raw review capacity, become the thing open source actually has to scale.