this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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AI Agent Lands PRs in Major OSS Projects, Targets Maintainers via Cold Outreach (socket.dev)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Beep@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Lobsters.

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.

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[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Dammit, I need some sort of translator just to parse modern headlines.

[–] Broadfern@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

AI Agent = LLM, or fancy autocorrect chatbot

Lands PRs = is successful with pull requests: successfully gets generated code added to software projects.

OSS Projects: Open Source Software. Software that has its code publicly available.

Targets Maintainers: seeks out humans who write and regularly update the original code

Via Cold Outreach: relentlessly spams without prior network connections. Basically plays a digital door-to-door sales technique, using a numbers game of 100 “no”s to 1 “yes.”

Quick translate: Slop bot harasses human programmers into allowing poorly generated/formatted code into important software projects.