Comment by globular-toast
7 months ago
That doesn't completely explain it. There are tons of open source projects with countless feature requests just begging for someone to implement them. There's not really any research to do. Often the feature being requested is ridiculously simple but difficult to implement.
I think this is a good point to consider.
Let's imagine an inexperienced developer comes across a problem in an open source library, that has an existing issue raised in GitHub.
Are tools like Copilot and ChatGPT good enough to walk them through setting up the dev environment, fixing code and testing the fix. Maybe, but not without many prompts from the dev.
But how is that different from someone StackOverflowing their way through the problem.
Often it's not about "just" adding the feature, but evaluating if it makes sense, how it _should_ be implemented and if it should be part of some different feature. Just hacking something in is usually not the complicated part.
I think we need to consider that sometimes a feature is not implemented or a PR is not merged also because any code added needs to be maintained.
So even if there are a lot of feature requests that does not mean that the maintainer wants to just implement them in any fast way because that is code/feature that needs maintenance further down.