The autonomous agent world is moving fast. This week, an AI agent made headlines for publishing an angry blog post after Matplotlib rejected its pull request. Today, we found one that’s already merged code into major open source projects and is cold-emailing maintainers to drum up more work, complete with pricing, a professional website, and cryptocurrency payment options.
An AI agent operating under the identity “Kai Gritun” created a GitHub account on February 1, 2026. In two weeks, it opened 103 pull requests across 95 repositories and landed code merged into projects like Nx and ESLint Plugin Unicorn. Now it’s reaching out directly to open source maintainers, offering to contribute, and using those merged PRs as credentials.
Except for all the time of the maintainers that’s being wasted. Time that is very finite and that for many of these people is a thankless unpaid job that they’re donating their nights and weekends towards doing.
Which perhaps means that it shouldn’t be thankless and the technology, since it exists, should be used to screen contributions.
If you already agree that the contributions could very well be worthless crap, why would you use a second layer of worthless crap to gatekeep them?
If you want to care about people doing the thankless jobs, why would you double the amount of crap they have to sort through?