Comment by jodrellblank

Even if you couldn't contact the submitter again, you could find all their past submissions to review, or expect that their more recent submissions have improved from experience, or block them from all future contributions. AI stops all that - every sumbmission is disconnected from the others, there is no single learning person with an arrow of time and a chronological life experience behind the submissions, but there also isn't a single person to block if they never change.

> "if all you did was a surface look, press merge"

As per the old joke, surface look: $5

Years of experience learning what to look for: $995

In the past a block of code that has jarring flaws says the author was likely low skill, or careless. People can fake competence but it's a low return because ugly inconsistent code with no comments and no error checking which (barely) works will keep someone employed and paid, more than pretty code which doesn't work at all will. Writing pretty code which also works implies knowledge, care, eye for detail, effort, tooling, which implies the author will have put some of that into solving the problem. AI can fake all the quick indicators of competence without the competence, meaning the surface look is less useful.

> "What else would your value be as a maintainer"

Is the maintainer paid or unpaid? If they are paid, the value is to make sure the software works and meets the business standards. If they are unpaid, what is the discussion about "value" at all? Maybe to keep it from becoming wildly broken, or maybe yes to literally be the person who presses merge because somebody has to.