Jan 24, 2026 18:00:00

Open source tldraw closes pull requests from external contributors due to AI

Pull requests , a feature offered by Git hosting services like GitHub, play an important role in open source software development. However, tldraw, an open source project developing a web-based drawing tool, has decided to temporarily close pull requests from external contributors. The change in its pull request policy is due to the increasing use of AI technology.

Contributions policy · Issue #7695 · tldraw/tldraw
https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/issues/7695

Steve Ruiz , founder and CEO of tldraw, points out that external contributors are increasingly including code generated solely by AI tools in pull requests, which often results in 'incomplete or misleading context,' 'lack of understanding of the code base,' and 'lack of follow-up by the author.'

The publication of a pull request promises that the maintainer will carefully review it and seriously consider adopting it, so it must be carefully selected. At the time of writing, the tldraw development team is considering a policy of temporarily closing pull requests from external contributors and selectively reopening those that are actually being considered, with the assumption that most unauthorized submissions will not be reviewed.

Ruiz said, 'I'm sorry, but I truly believe this decision is in the best interest of the project code community. Hopefully, GitHub will provide better contribution management tools and we'll be able to open pull requests again.' Concerns about the quality of AI-generated code have been discussed on the social news site Hacker News, with comments such as ' It's always been a problem in GitHub culture ' and ' AI generates trial code quickly, but reviewing it takes time .'