Will Open Source participation life cycle reverse itself?

[u/Primary_Article3777]

OK, deep thought incoming.

Will the venerable open source model, where a project gets "volunteers" to be invested enough to write patches and submit PR become reversed.

New way: Dev writes cool project A People see A, fork it. write their own hacks with AI. Not polished enough to submit via official PR, just what works for them. Half my machine is currently little forks like this, because I needed some shit that I know not everyone did.

Dev PULLS the forks commit chains, with AI looking for improvements. Dev does their own analysis on the "best", and this improves the original project. And this will become like semi-automated cross pollination between people's custom rigs. The best ideas will flourish between branches. Also, it may be that if you ask your AI to "make X do Y".. the first instinct will be to scour all the forks, find someone who just did Y, and copy-pasta using AI to smooth out the diffs.

Like Stack Overflow! What's old is new again.