As I was putting the final touches on the first working version of bulletty, I noticed that Hacktoberfest—the annual event hosted by DigitalOcean where participants earn t-shirts by successfully completing six pull requests (PRs) during October—was approaching. I thought this could be a great opportunity to involve the community, improve the feed reader, and increase the project's visibility. To prepare, I organized the Issues section on GitHub, creating one issue per feature from the roadmap and for bugs, adding detailed descriptions and images. I then tagged them appropriately with labels like “Improvements,” “Bugs,” “Good First Issue,” and “Hacktoberfest.” A generic CONTRIBUTING file was drafted, outlining the procedures for submitting changes, reporting bugs, and opening PRs. A few days before October, I promoted the project across my personal social accounts on X, Bluesky, and Mastodon, and also posted on the /r/hacktoberfest subreddit. Discovering the official Hacktoberfest Discord server, I posted there as well to recruit contributors. I even tried Hacker News, though it yielded the least engagement. Within days, the GitHub star count rose to nearly a hundred, and I received numerous responses on various platforms, which I considered a strong initial success. However, once October began, I was quickly met with numerous requests from contributors asking to be assigned issues without any prior discussion. This approach felt premature and risky, as assigning issues without understanding the proposer’s plan could block others from contributing. Therefore, I updated the CONTRIBUTING file with clear guidelines emphasizing that contributors must first engage in a discussion about their intended implementation. Only after sufficient dialogue would I assign issues. For bug fixes, I allowed submitting PRs without prior discussion as long as contributors explained their changes thoroughly. One particular interaction stood out when a user requesting assignment mentioned a “knowledge,” which led me to suspect the involvement of some AI-assisted or “vibe-coding” workflow. Upon confirmation, I further revised the CONTRIBUTING guidelines to address AI-generated code. I stated that I would not ban AI altogether but that purely AI-generated PRs would not be accepted. Contributors must disclose AI usage, take responsibility for their submissions, and be prepared for thorough code reviews. Undisclosed AI use would be considered dishonest and lead to PR closure. I shared my view that while I use AI tools myself, delegating entire implementations to AI without genuine understanding is problematic. This suspicion was reinforced when the user submitted a PR that did not build, lacked proper formatting despite explicit instructions, contained poorly titled commits, and inconsistencies such as changing a method name without updating its trait definition. These signs pointed to an automated code-generation attempt. I closed the PR and requested more thoughtful contributions. Moreover, some issues received vague “attack plans” that appeared AI-generated and nonsensical, highlighting a challenge in filtering out low-quality input. Reflecting on feedback from other maintainers, it seems Hacktoberfest often attracts spammy PRs focusing on trivial changes, such as typo fixes or simple comment alterations. With the rise of advanced AI models capable of rewriting large code sections, maintaining open source projects is becoming more complex. While AI might handle simple tasks well, large AI-driven refactors risk introducing hard-to-detect bugs and obscure code semantics. Unlike human developers, AI lacks the conceptual understanding of software as “theory building,” a notion emphasized by Peter Naur. Furthermore, the community struggles to agree on what constitutes AI-generated versus human work, complicating moderation. Despite these challenges, there were valuable contributions during Hacktoberfest. After the initial influx of questionable PRs, more engaged contributors submitted meaningful improvements. A notable example was the addition of next and previous navigation in the reader, a critical feature previously missing. The implementation also taught me about using Rust’s Rc<T> for reference counting, enriching my understanding. Overall, Hacktoberfest brought both opportunities and obstacles. It catalyzed community involvement and accelerated feature development but also introduced complexities related to contribution quality, especially with AI-assisted coding. Clear communication, stringent guidelines, and vigilant review processes proved essential to maintaining project integrity throughout the event.
