Can AI Be the Balm for Developers&#8217; Burnout Qualm?
Developers contributing to open source projects constantly face burnout. This issue came to light when a developer detailed the escalating burnout among Rust open source project contributors in a blog post. This is quite concerning as it could put a mental strain on developers enduring one to spend extra time on ‘passion projects’, which get increasingly demanding. “Open source burnout — apathy and general lack of compassion towards open source work has made it unviable for talented devs,” writes Pavithra Kodmad, a design engineer at GitHub, highlighting the impact of burnouts on open source projects. In worst-case scenario, there have been many projects that put up messages like this one, apologising to the users of their open source projects for shutting them down. “I needed to choose between ‘keep my open source project’ or ‘keep my mental and physical health’,” writes the developer, wisely choosing the latter. GitHub offers a helpful post that outlines a balance for open source maintainers. However, the problem persists, prompting developers to constantly write posts that say, “What I hate most about burnout is seeing my projects suffer. More than 160 tools piled up under review, resulting in some unhappy customers,” on X. Good open source projects have an overwhelming number of issues and pull requests. Developers often require new contributors but guidance and mentorship requires further effort from the maintainers, who are already overworked. This issue is also being addressed with platforms like First Timers Only, which assists young programmers to make their first contribution to open-source projects effectively. The sustainability of good open source projects over a long period of time depends on more than the initial popularity. GitHub measures this by stars or forks on the platform. Natik Gadzhi explains on X that better measures are, “finding out if the project has robust tooling for contributors, how much time it takes to review and merge a PR and what the issue triage pipeline looks like”. And to manage some of these factors and ease the workload of the developers, AI can play a crucial role. AI to the Rescue Microsoft Copilot has already automated a lot of rote work done by developers and has become the go-to tool for around half of all developers. But apart from this, there are tools like Dependabot, Webhint, GitGuardian, Synk and Renovate that automatically open pull requests for new dependency versions, give alerts on vulnerable dependencies, analyse code and essentially do all the mundane tasks. There are other tools that relieve the load of developers from the mundane task of code creation. But tools like Dependabot, GreenKeeper, Snyk, AutoFac, FOSSA, and Mend.io go a step further to assist on different parts of the workflow. For example, Synk automatically finds and fixes security vulnerabilities in open source project’s dependencies. It scans the project to identify security issues and offers solutions or patches to fix them. It also monitors the project continuously for any new vulnerabilities that might appear in the future. Another platform, AutoFac, helps developers manage different parts of their software applications, organising how they work together to manage the structure of the application. A newer tool developed this year was Codium AI PR Agent, which automates pull request analysis, feedback and suggestions. “CodiumAI gives you a full suite of AI-powered tools integrated into a single tool,” Santiago Valdarrama posted on X. Startups like InfieldAI, which is an alternative to Dependabot, grew out of the YCombinator accelerator program and is also funded by them to build tools that provide a step-by-step path to safe open source component management. Mintlify, another startup develops software to automate documentation tasks which take up most of the traffic in an open source project. “For public-facing and open source products, documentation has a direct impact on user adoption,” said Han Wang, CEO of the company. Maxime Labonne, ML scientist at JP Morgan, told AIM that these tools already help him, “During my Christmas break, I had my laptop next to work on my open source projects. It’s not that time consuming to be honest with you, because my strategy is to automate everything!” At the end of the day, who’s better at time management than open source developers who are taking up a herculean task of solving the world’s problems? AI-powered features or tools, say like request analyser, automated code review and mentorship bot, cross-project dependency coordinator, AI-assisted user story and requirement generator would change the way open source contributions happen in the coming years.
AI tools are changing the game in open source development. They’re not taking over from developers, but making their work easier.
AI tools are changing the game in open source development. They're not taking over from developers, but making their work easier. 
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K L Krithika is a tech journalist at AIM. Apart from writing tech news, she enjoys reading sci-fi and pondering the impossible technologies, trying not to confuse it with reality.