The tldraw maintainers announced a temporary change to how they handle contributions: new pull requests from external contributors will be automatically closed by default. They’re explicit that this is not a rejection of community involvement — issues, bug reports, and discussion threads are still welcome — but a way to protect maintainer attention until GitHub offers better tools for managing unsolicited PRs.
The core argument is that an open PR isn’t just “code waiting in a queue”; it’s a promise that someone will review it carefully and engage with the author. In practice, the project has been flooded with AI-generated PRs that are syntactically fine but come with misleading context, misunderstand the codebase, and rarely get follow-up from the submitter. Their new workflow is “close first, selectively reopen” for changes the maintainers actually want to shepherd.
Even if you don’t use tldraw, it’s a useful snapshot of how open source norms are changing: contribution pipelines built for humans struggle when the cost of producing plausible code goes to near zero.