Djangocon EU: AI-assisted contributions and maintainer load - Paolo Melchiorre¶
(One of my summaries of the 2026 Djangocon EU in Athens).
Paolo is very active in the Django community. He’s seeing more and more problems crop up for maintainers, related to AI-assisted contributions.
He showed two quotes that seem to be about AI, but were really about something else:
“It cripples the mind”: Edsger Dijkstra (shortest path algorithm creator) in 1975, talking about the Cobol language.
“You can’t trust code that you didn’t totally create yourself”: Ken Thompson (Unix creator), talking about code within his own company.
New technologies aren’t always welcomed with open arms.
He then showed an AI-adjusted/improved image of Django-the-guitar-player. With six fingers on his left hand and a too-modern guitar and amplifier. Amplification: that’s what might happen with Django:
More contributors, but also more low-value contributions.
More code, but also more untested code.
What will happen? He showed some examples from other projects. Being swamped with low-quality pull requests, for instance. Within the Django community, the jazzband project is stopping: there were more reasons, but “AI slop” was one of them.
In matplotlib, an AI pull request was closed. Then the AI bot wrote a blog entry complaining about it and started attacking the open source maintainer. Automated conflict.
Some possible ways to react. What will we choose?
You are responsible for any code you submit, including Ai-generated code. (Python guidelines).
If the human effort is less than the effort to review it: don’t submit it. (FastAPI).
Unverified AI-generated contributions create unnecessary maintenance burden. Submissions that don’t show human verification won’t be considered. (Django) [Reinout: I might have mis-quoted it a bit, I can’t quickly find the quote on the website during live-blogging ]
Low-value AI-generated conributions will be closed to preserve maintainer time. (Matplotlib).
No LLM-generated code. No AI-contributions. (ZIG)
AI is a tool that amplifies problems and possibilities. So responsibility and protection must scale. We need more human in the loop.
Unrelated photo explanation: a recent trip to the “Modellbundesbahn” in Germany. The old, disused locomotive shed at Ottbergen.