You make a copy of the code (“fork”) for yourself, make edits, then request that your changes be accepted into the original project (“pull/merge request”). Someone from the project has to check the edits, make that decision and hit accept or decline.
Ideally, you’d also first talk to the developers in charge of the project to see if your changes would be wanted in the first place.
(Or you’d start by reviewing existing bug reports and feature requests and addressing one of those.)
What I mean is, it’s generally better to not just throw code at them and hope they’ll like it. If you check first to see if they want it, you can save yourself from wasting effort on writing code that they’ll decline.
I assume when people do that it’s because they’re going to be making the fork regardless, and they think they’re being helpful by submitting a pull request with thier AI slop… But really they should just keep it on thier own fork if they don’t understand the changes but want to use it regardless…
generally yeah. the problem is that the barrier to entry used to be higher so fewer people knew how to write code to integrate with the project before coding agents. now anyone who can install Claude Code has a seat at that table
Can anyone describe the process of code contribution with open-source. It’s it like anyone hands in a code.
You make a copy of the code (“fork”) for yourself, make edits, then request that your changes be accepted into the original project (“pull/merge request”). Someone from the project has to check the edits, make that decision and hit accept or decline.
Ideally, you’d also first talk to the developers in charge of the project to see if your changes would be wanted in the first place.
(Or you’d start by reviewing existing bug reports and feature requests and addressing one of those.)
What I mean is, it’s generally better to not just throw code at them and hope they’ll like it. If you check first to see if they want it, you can save yourself from wasting effort on writing code that they’ll decline.
I assume when people do that it’s because they’re going to be making the fork regardless, and they think they’re being helpful by submitting a pull request with thier AI slop… But really they should just keep it on thier own fork if they don’t understand the changes but want to use it regardless…
generally yeah. the problem is that the barrier to entry used to be higher so fewer people knew how to write code to integrate with the project before coding agents. now anyone who can install Claude Code has a seat at that table