Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

As a maintainer of both Grafana Tempo and CNCF Jaeger, and a dev advocate, we've seen a large increase in LLM-supported contributions. Pull requests, issues, discussions, and design proposals have been flooding into these projects at a rate never before seen. The level of effort to submit a reasonable-looking PR has dropped to nearly 0. The level of effort required to review a reasonable-looking PR has also been reduced with LLM assistance, but not nearly to the same degree.

Within Jaeger and Tempo, we've begun discussing ways to approach these PRs. We want to encourage contributions to OSS projects, but need invested humans on the other side of the PRs in to merge them. Generally, we celebrate the lowering of both language and technical barriers for participation, but as gatekeepers of critical OSS projects, it's our responsibility to only merge stable, well-considered code.

Join to commiserate, discuss, or simply listen to some war stories about what it's like to be an OSS maintainer in the land of LLMs. We'll also survey responses we and others have taken across the OSS community. This submission was entirely human-generated and reviewed. We don't know if that matters :).