Very interesting to see if they are successful, and/or if this type of maintainer load reducing could be adapted to something like ubuntu/debian where maintaining packages is quite time consuming.
The value of Debian/Ubuntu is that there are people vetting and packaging and testing software. If you remove that and have AI do it, there isn't much left.
This agent isn't claiming to displace that work; more like act as the contribution equivalent of Tier 1 Support in a customer-service setting (where the actual project maintainers would then be Tier 2 Support).
Such agents would mostly provide guidance to jumping through the hoops necessary to get your PR in a state where it's mergeable according to the project's contribution guidelines — removing the need for humans to be that guide. (In other words, they'd act as a "compiler for your PR" that you could iterate on, with good English-language error messages. IMHO something that should already exist locally — but git has no local reified concept of PRs, so this is hard.)
But I would expect that in almost every case, the project's human maintainers would still eventually step in to review the PR, after the bot seems happy with it.
---
Mind you, in theory, for a particular set of limited-scope (but frequently occurring) problems, Tier 1 Support agents are usually empowered to solve those problems directly for a customer. And likewise, there could potentially be a set of limited-scope contribution types that a Tier 1 Project Contribution Auditor would be able to directly approve. Things like, say, fixing typos in doc comments (gated by the bot determining that the diff increases semantic validity of the text by some weird LLM "parseability" metric.)
