At a Maintainer Unconference in Brussels this year, a breakout session had maintainers jotting down thoughts on the future of open source. One sticky note stood out: As AI gets better at writing code, human work around code becomes more important and more invisible. Mentoring new contributors, building trust across a community, making the judgement calls that shape a project’s direction: that’s the work that turns a repository into a living collaboration. And with the speed of AI, the people doing the work are carrying more than ever. Pull requests merged on GitHub have nearly doubled year over year, and agentic workflows are accelerating the pace even further. As one maintainer put it: How much time should I spend on something that you didn’t spend any time on? I’ve been part of Maintainer Month for five years now. The conversations I’m having with maintainers this year feel different—there’s a weariness, but there’s also innovation.…