2026-10-24 –, Room 332
For decades, OSS communities grew through visible friction. Newcomers filed issues, asked questions, and in doing so announced their arrival. Maintainers noticed. Contributors became maintainers. Now AI is removing that friction.
Through an NSF-backed program, stdlib conducted 100+ stakeholder interviews and found the same pattern: newcomers increasingly rely on AI instead of engaging with communities. Maintainers never see them arrive, and communities lose opportunities to grow contributors.
This session is intended for maintainers, OSPO leads, and researchers interested in the future of FOSS, Attendees will leave with evidence-based frameworks for growing contributors & community as the old, accidental on-ramps quietly disappear.
This talk is based on a problem widely faced by OS organisations around the ecosystem in today's time. Although AI has accelerated the growth and productivity of individuals but beginners tend to overplay this great resource in un-rightous activities.
As the recent Google Summer of Code program was announced we maintainers saw a huge wave of contributors flooding the pipelines with AI based PRs. 1000+ lines of code just to fix a lint error, nearly causing npm security threats and breaking functionalities with un-desired deps.
OSS depends on it contributors, maintainers and Admins. But only a technically and truthfully strong contributor can become a great maintainer on which the growth of the project depends. To make a tall and strong building the foundation should be built very-strong and without any faults.
This talk is deeply referenced by the scenarios we faced in the last one year. The sole aim behind this talk is to provide other OS maintainer and OSPOs with real-world strategies and best-practices which they can follow in their projects to sustain and maintain the project.
But again, How do we know our strategies have worked around? After taking 100+ interviews with our stakeholders as part of NSF-Pose Program we say clarity for 2 things. First what challenges has the OS community faced in the last few years after AI became huge. Second, How our strategies sustained this shift to provide its users with the best-experience and Technology used actively by 10,000+ users world-wide
This talk is referenced by a year worth of effort from the stdlib community which we expressed through our blogs:-
Neeraj Pathak is an SDE intern in Deloitte working on Open-source technologies and ML models. Alongside he's a Software Developer & core-maintainer of Stdlib, a JS library for numerical and scientific computing. He has also worked on a Research & ML Open source project at Google Deepmind namely at JAX-Privacy, and received a Letter of Recommendation from Research scientist at Google. In the past he has hosted multiple talks for the local dev-community based out in India with monthly meet-ups being organised. Neeraj was previously invited by Y Combinator to attend their first startup school talk in India.