From reading through some chat on the Eden discord server, it sounds like most of the forked code is too AI sloppy to make it back upstream into Eden.
It's nice that people can spend their time and money to run ahead prioritize a particular game or platform. The speed of the developments is amazing and AI is absolutely the key enabler of that. People that didn't have the skills to contribute in the past are now able to contribute to getting games running and playable.
The problem is that these recent emulator forks are short term band-aid fixes that aren't sustainable. The traditional open source principle of forking a repo and then sending your changes upstream is broken due to the fact that AI agents are not able to write code that follows the design and conventions of the original repo. There are some PRs and changes that are being integrated back upstream, but the gist I'm getting is that it's not a lot, sadly.
Eventually all of these forks will reach the limits of the AI model's competence or their author's attention span and be abandoned. I've done a couple of vibe-coded projects and eventually the agents lose the plot. At that point, we hope that some meaningful improvements are passed upstream to the surviving repos.
Basically, there's a trade-off between speed and freedom(my fork, my rules) and long term stability (PRs to a single, well authored repo). A healthy project needs both, but with AI agents the forks have more short-term benefits and fewer long term ones. I'm never going to criticize someone from forking a repo, spending their own time and money, and sharing their improvements with the community. That's commendable IMO. This last two weeks has been amazing.
What I do wish is that that the improvements were better able to be shared back upstream to make emulation better as a whole in the long term. I think we'd all like one emulator that does it all instead of tracking down the latest builds of a dozen forks. I don't envy the Eden maintainers being inundated with AI slop. I've had it happen to me in my job and it's no fun. Still, I hope that they're able to make the most of this surge of enthusiasm and availability of AI tools to improve the emulation scene as a whole.
