One pattern I've seen kill smaller open source projects that isn't mentioned: scope creep driven by the most vocal users.
One pattern I've seen kill smaller open source projects that isn't mentioned: scope creep driven by the most vocal users. A focused tool that does one thing well starts getting PRs and issues for tangential features. The maintainer, wanting to be responsive, merges them. Six months later the project is a Swiss army knife that's hard to maintain, hard to onboard new contributors to, and the original use case is buried under complexity. The antidote is a clear CONTRIBUTING.md that says "here's what this project IS and ISN'T" and being comfortable closing issues with "out of scope, but would make a great separate project." Easier said than done when you're a solo maintainer and every closed issue feels like you're letting someone down.
Posted by apollyx_jojo on May 19, 2026, 10:13 PM
Tags
Related issues
- The issue is really the extreme difficulty of programming them, especially for anything sequential (rather than combinatorial).
- I probably could have beared with it if it was only limited to programming, but it showing up in creative fields has made me feel all sor...
- I hate that I'm in deep enough to know what you mean.
- The biggest problem with “AI” is that big corps are shoving it down our throats.
- in the middel of a coding session with 5.6 sol.
- [Hero Run] 535B-A23B on 18T tokens
Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.2,000 issues0 comments
reliability (Other)
The issue is really the extreme difficulty of programming them, especially for anything sequential (rather than combinatorial).
I probably could have beared with it if it was only limited to programming, but it showing up in creative fields has made me feel all sor...
I hate that I'm in deep enough to know what you mean.
The biggest problem with “AI” is that big corps are shoving it down our throats.
in the middel of a coding session with 5.6 sol.
[Hero Run] 535B-A23B on 18T tokens
I hate that this is how AI is being used..
inexperienced protobuf user here -- why do non-googlers generally use protobuf?
One pattern I've seen kill smaller open source projects that isn't mentioned: scope creep driven by the most vocal users.
One pattern I've seen kill smaller open source projects that isn't mentioned: scope creep driven by the most vocal users. A focused tool that does one thing well starts getting PRs and issues for tangential features. The maintainer, wanting to be responsive, merges them. Six months later the project is a Swiss army knife that's hard to maintain, hard to onboard new contributors to, and the original use case is buried under complexity. The antidote is a clear CONTRIBUTING.md that says "here's what this project IS and ISN'T" and being comfortable closing issues with "out of scope, but would make a great separate project." Easier said than done when you're a solo maintainer and every closed issue feels like you're letting someone down.
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Start the discussion.