Something shifted over the last year or so, and it's been hard to put into words.

Open a PR on a popular repo today and observe what happens. Within seconds, a bot leaves an AI review summarizing your own change back to you. Another bot posts a preview deployment. Another posts a "walkthrough" with a sequence diagram nobody asked for. Sometimes a fourth shows up to respond to the third. By the time a human actually looks at it, the thread is a wall of generated text, and the real conversation (the human part) is buried somewhere in the middle.

The details vary, but the shape is the same: maintainers are no longer just deciding whether a contribution is good, they’re deciding whether they can afford to find out.