AI made it easier to produce code-shaped output. Good contribution still means making your work easy to understand, review, and trust.

You can now produce a pull request in the time it takes to make a coffee.

Often less.

This depends on the coffee, obviously. If you grind the beans, heat the water properly, and have opinions about extraction, the pull request may win by a comfortable margin.

That should make us pause.

Fast tools are useful. A coding assistant can help you read unfamiliar code, sketch an approach, write a test, or spot an edge case you would have missed. There is no virtue in doing everything the slow way just because it gives the work a faint smell of candle wax and suffering.

The problem starts when the diff becomes almost free.

A pull request has never been only a diff.…