Contributor Poker: Review as Investment

In open source maintenance, PR review is not quality assurance — it is investment in a contributor’s long-term development. Maintainers “play the person, not the cards” (Loris Cro): they bet that early review effort will pay off as the contributor becomes trusted and prolific. AI-assisted contributions break this by making the contributor a proxy, not a developing engineer. The human behind the PR did not build codebase intuition, cannot maintain the code post-merge, and cannot handle follow-up discussions requiring deep understanding. LLVM’s AI policy names the inverse: “extractive contributions” that consume maintainer time without developing the contributor. Simon Willison: “if a PR was mostly written by an LLM, why should a project maintainer spend time reviewing it as opposed to firing up their own LLM to solve the same problem?”