I think we truly are in this global

developer surge [music] with 36 million

new developers from the past year.

That's more than one every second. I

think part of it is AI tools are

lowering barriers, making it easier to

jump in and get started. But that real

driver is human collaboration. People

are finding groups that they want to

work with. We saw over 43 million pull

requests merged monthly. This is

fundamentally about 180 million

developers choosing to collaborate

globally.

India added 5.2 million developers and

they're on track to account for one in

three new developers in 2030. I think

this is really showing that the global

stage is stepping up to support the open

source ecosystem. We're seeing growth

especially across Asia, Brazil,

Indonesia and they're all bringing new

perspectives, new solutions and more

time zones to work on these problems.

So, I've written a lot about the graying

of open source and how existing

maintainers are burning out or stepping

away. And this rise in new and often

younger developers globally gives me a

lot of hope for long-term

sustainability. There's community boot

camps in Africa and government skilling

in APAC that's really helping this next

generation of open source step in.

AI slop is real. [music] Maintainers are

dealing with it every day. But I do

think the community is adapting. We're

creating better guidelines, building

detection tools. GitHub's released the

AI assessment comment labeler and the AI

moderator to help. And we have

maintainers like Daniel Row who's using

AI to build issue triage systems to

really help with managing that AI slop.

So maintainers are using AI

strategically to handle duplicate

issues, automate dependency updates,

improve docs, and they do all this so

that they can focus on what really

matters, the community.

AI infrastructure [music] is hot. We're

seeing projects like Olama, VLLM just

exploding. But 40% of the top projects

have nothing to do with AI. We have

projects like Home Assistant, VS Code,

GDAU also thriving. This does feel a

little bit like the JavaScript ecosystem

in the early 2010s where there was a new

framework every week until the community

really settled on a standard.

Standards like MCP or the model context

protocol are the invisible

infrastructure that makes open

collaboration impossible. I think

because this is a new standard, a new

protocol, we've seen the community flock

to it. Over 37,000 stars in just eight

months. This is really showing that

adoption is there and people want

standards so that they can keep

building, keep innovating and keep

building more AI tools.

We are seeing [music] this huge influx

in first-time contributors. I think it's

bringing a lot of new blood, a lot of

new ideas to open source, but it is also

adding a lot of burden to maintainers.

when you have a lot of new people who

don't know if they're ready to commit or

ready to become maintainers, it's giving

them a lot of extra work. So, I think

that's why we're seeing a rise in this

like AI tools for issue triage and just

helping on board and and helping make it

easier to bring these new people into

your project.

Open source really is about community.

It's about a group of people working

together to build something new to

innovate and really help the world with

what they're doing. I find a lot of new

contributors, they join a project

because they care about that mission,

because they're excited about what it is

that community is building. Find

something that you're excited about with

people that you want to do this work

with. And I think that's the best way to

have long-term career in open source.