{
  "slug": "ai-pull-request-flood",
  "title": "Maintainers are drowning, and the review queue is the bottleneck nobody funds",
  "summary": "Producing a plausible patch became free. Reviewing one did not. Do not ban the agents, put a human signature and a per human rate limit on the intake.",
  "lede": "The cost of producing a plausible contribution collapsed. The cost of evaluating one did not. Banning agents is the wrong control and it will not hold, because the problem was never the tool. It is that nobody can tell how many humans are on the other end.",
  "date": "2026-09-12",
  "reading_time": "17 min read",
  "category": "Standards",
  "tags": ["open source maintainers", "AI pull requests", "code review", "contributor accountability", "DCO", "supply chain security", "proof of human"],
  "image": "https://cdn.twc.sh/images/igcache/AI%20Pull%20Request%20Flood/1200_630/blog.jpg",
  "url": "/blog/ai-pull-request-flood.html",
  "wordcount": 4029,
  "related": ["human-signed-publish", "delegation-chain-depth", "human-feedback-integrity"],
  "schema": "Article"
}