If AI could really accelerate or even take over the majority of work on an established codebase, we should be seeing a revolution in FOSS libraries and ecosystems. The gap has been noted many times, but so far all anyone's been able to dig up are one-off, laboriously-tended-to pull requests. No libraries or other projects with any actual downstream users.
It's taken over my mature codebase just fine. I'm not in the business of spending tokens on open source projects though.
But plenty of maintainers are in the business of spending mass amounts of time, energy, and actual money on open source projects. Some make a business out of it. Some are sponsored by their employer to spend paid work hours on FOSS projects. If LLMs could help them, some significant number would.
But if there are any instances of this, I have not seen them, and seemingly neither has anyone I've posed the question to, or any passersby.
How would you know? I don't label my changes that were made by AI.
Somebody would. Somebody would be an AI evangelist, or would become one. The FOSS ecosystem is large enough to be sure of that. We're not seeing nothing, we're just not seeing at all what the marketers and AInfluencers are prophesying. We're not even seeing what you describe. Why is that? Why is it limited to random commenters and not seen at all in the wild?
There is a Cloudflare project that published the entire AI generated history complete with prompts. And of course in many projects the majority of PRs are opened by dependabot, it's not an LLM but it's a "bot" at least.
I agree we're not seeing open source projects be entirely automated with LLMs yet. People still have to find issues, generate PRs (even if mostly automatic), open them, respond to comments, etc. It takes time and energy.