I have no unique perspective to add other than an obvious question: If the PR is low quality, why not just close/reject it? Does it matter if it's AI assisted or not?

Is there a counter petition?

The author of the PR is a long time nodejs contributor & conference speaker. He explicitly claims that `I've reviewed all changes myself.`.

In the end it's a question if you trust him to submit a useful, well-reviewed PR. Doesn't matter if it was created using AI or not.

> A 19k lines-of-code Pull Request was opened in January, 2026.

Such a PR should be rejected simply because of the shear size of it, regardless of AI use. Seriously, who submits a 19k line PR? Just make many small ones.

On the one hand, agreed

On the other hand, I haven’t and I believe many of us, have never paid node any money so it feels weird to dictate their approach.

This is a silly reactionary response. Where is the line? Can I use AI to look up APIs? Write documentation? What if I write a function and ask AI to test it? What if I manually implemented an idea that I thought about after chatting with AI a few weeks ago?

Stop treating this like it's going to go away. We need actual solutions for the FOSS community that make reviewing AI assisted work tractable.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47413195

@indutny explains their views in that thread.

If they allow AI in Node it just might do a full rewrite into Rust, Go or Elixir ;)

I can see the good intention in this move, but it's not realistic. The genie isn't going back in the bottle, so the priority shouldn't be artificial limits, but more emphasis on review and sets of eyes required to sign off on a merge.

I don't see, how such policies can possibly achieve more good, then harm.

A person, who posts slop for whatever reason, or runs bots that post slop, will simply ignore them.

An honest person, who cares about the quality of their contribution and genuinely wants to improve the project will be more limited in the choice of tools to do so.

So, this policy only serves to limit honest contributors, while doing absolutely nothing to stop spammers/slopposters.

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Honestly, this is a small pebble but feels like a ripple in the reasons why node.js is losing to bun and others.