June 12, 2026
PR or Panic?
I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
Programmer slams the door on mystery code as commenters split between “fair” and “too harsh”
TLDR: A longtime open-source coder says he’s done reviewing surprise code likely generated by AI and will now close many of those submissions unless people discuss them first. Commenters are split between sympathy for exhausted maintainers and frustration that extra rules could shut out eager newcomers using new tools.
A veteran open-source developer just dropped a very blunt message: stop sending surprise fixes made by chatbots. In his essay, "I Am Not a Reverse Centaur", he says he refuses to spend his time acting like a human babysitter for machine-written code. His new rule is simple: if you want to suggest a change, talk first. No more random drive-by submissions landing in his inbox like digital junk mail.
And wow, the crowd had feelings. Some commenters were fully on Team Author, saying this is less an anti-artificial-intelligence rant and more a burned-out maintainer dealing with a very real flood of low-effort submissions. One person basically said, even if he loved AI, this would still be a nightmare. Others zeroed in on the biggest mystery of the whole post: how exactly can he tell in seconds whether a real person is behind the code? That question popped up fast, and readers clearly wanted receipts.
But not everyone was cheering. One critic called the “open an issue before sending a fix” rule pointless red tape, arguing that review is already the bottleneck and adding friction just makes things worse. Meanwhile, another commenter brought the emotional curveball: non-programmers are thrilled that these tools finally let them build things, which turned the thread from a workplace gripe into a mini culture war. The vibe? Half “protect the maintainers,” half “don’t gatekeep the newcomers,” with a side of existential dread over humans becoming machine hall monitors.
Key Points
- •The author says contributions to his open source projects have increased and that nearly all are now made with LLMs.
- •He argues that reviewing machine-generated pull requests turns maintainers into what Cory Doctorow calls “reverse centaurs.”
- •The author no longer wants to spend time reviewing unsolicited LLM-generated code submissions.
- •His contribution guidelines require contributors to first propose changes in an issue before submitting a pull request.
- •He says unsolicited pull requests that show no evidence of human involvement are closed immediately.