Your contributors are AI-first now. Is your project?

The same question keeps coming up in maintainer conversations: what do you do when the pull request queue fills with work written by agents? It’s something Nicholas Tindle, founding AI engineer at AutoGPT, also deals with every day. I spoke with him in May for Maintainer Month. At the time of the interview, AutoGPT had over 180,000 stars and around 150 open pull requests. A big chunk of those pull requests were written by agents, including Copilot, OpenClaw, and AutoGPT’s own internal tooling, among others. Most maintainers I talk to have the same reaction: close the door. Turn off pull requests. Don’t tax the team with reviewing slop. Nicholas saw an upside: It’s basically somebody else paying for your compute. Nicholas Tindle, founding AI engineer at AutoGPT The way he sees it, if a contributor wants to spend their tokens improving your project, let them. Just make it so the only way through the door is the way that works for you. Your docs aren’t the problem. Discovery is. AutoGPT tried the obvious thing first. Better contributor guidelines. Better docs. A whole wiki dedicated to working with the repo. None of it moved the needle. It turns out the tools aren’t going to go read your docs unless they’re told to. That’s the part a lot of us get wrong. We treat documentation like the agent will go find it. It won’t. Agents read what’s in front of them, at the level of the directory they’re working in. So AutoGPT started putting instructions where agents look. First CLAUDE.md files, because laude was generating pull requests without enough repository-specific context. The commit trailer made each one easy to spot, because they announced themselves in the commit trailer. Then they hit the next wall: Copilot and Codex ignore Claude files, because they’re not Claude. So they centralized the standard AGENTS.md and pointed Claude files at it. Here’s the nuance I found most useful. AGENTS.md is scoped to a directory. A skill can be discovered outside that directory. (If you