"Agents change the cost balance between generating and reviewing code. Code generation via AI agents can be automated and becomes cheap so that code input volume increases, but review is still a manual human activity, burdened on the shoulders of few core developers." Tim Hoffmann, matplotlib maintainer, on GitHub , February 11, 2026 Say you need a small utility for a side project. A few years ago that meant a search, a README, a quick scan of the issues tab to see if anyone had complai...