For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself. AI tools have changed the economics of this very quickly. We use them ourselves every day, but a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. For a browser, this matters. A browser runs untrusted input from the entire internet on the user’s machine, and one well-disguised vulnerability is all an attacker needs. We have already seen patient, well-resourced campaigns in open source to earn maintainer trust and abuse it. What has changed is how much faster and cheaper it has become to produce work that looks like a serious contribution.

Designs must champion usability and clarity, presenting a genuine, good faith choice.