Welcome to Maintainer Month: Celebrating the people behind the code

At a Maintainer Unconference in Brussels this year, a breakout session had maintainers jotting down thoughts on the future of open source. One sticky note stood out: As AI gets better at writing code, human work around code becomes more important and more invisible. Mentoring new contributors, building trust across a community, making the judgement calls that shape a project’s direction: that’s the work that turns a repository into a living collaboration. And with the speed of AI, the people doing the work are carrying more than ever.