PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

As AI-generated pull requests flood open source repositories like OpenClaw—which saw PR submissions jump from 2 per week to 3,400 per week—the ecosystem is developing reputation-based filtering systems similar to email spam controls from the early 2000s, with merge rates now heavily favoring established contributors. The influx of low-effort, AI-generated submissions is reducing diversity of thought in open source, with multiple contributors submitting identical features and fixes, undermining the principle that diverse perspectives catch more bugs and improve code quality.