Does David Heinemeier Hansson Prefer Agent Pull Requests?

David Heinemeier Hansson would rather get an agent-written pull request to one of his projects than one written by a human. The quality is better, and the median programmer's pull requests toward an average open source project are already getting outclassed by agents.

He has run open source projects for 25 years and has looked at the output of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of programmers. Most programmers suck in the sense that they do not write the code he wants written. They do not prepare bug reports with all the relevant information, do not detail pull requests with the why, do not fill in needed code comments, do not double-check their work, and do not write unit tests. Agents will do all of that if you tell them to. They follow instructions very diligently most of the time, sometimes to a fault.

Rejecting an agent pull request feels a lot less bad because the person did not even write it. Open source maintainers carry way too much neuroticism and anxiety, treating any contribution as an obligation to land it in the code base. The project is allowed to exist and evolve according to the maintainer's vision and roadmap. Saying no, or no thank you, is much easier in the agentic age, because declining a contribution does not inconvenience or hurt the feelings of a human.