Interview with a Maintainer

Erin Marsh, the primary maintainer of libcapstan—a foundational protocol library used by 80 million downloads monthly—discusses how she became responsible for critical internet infrastructure almost by accident after reporting bugs in 2019 and being given commit access. She describes her mixed experiences using AI tools like Copilot to manage the massive workload, noting that current AI struggles with the project's legacy C codebase and can create unintended issues, though she remains optimistic about AI's potential to handle routine tasks like the influx of agent-generated pull requests her project now receives.