2026-06-09 –, Maschinenhaus
This talk addresses how we attempt to manage the changes to Open Source Maintainership resulting from the Agentic AI approach within the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Way is About People — AI should free maintainers to do stuff that matters, not replace them; it should empower maintainers in the Age of AI.
Contributors are already using AI agents in their workflows. That fact isn't up for debate — what is up for debate is what PMCs do about it. The wrong responses (ignore it; ban it; rubber-stamp it) all break the Apache Way in different ways. The right response is to ask a sharper question: what does a maintainer's day look like, and which of those hours genuinely need a human?
This talk argues that AI's biggest contribution to open source isn't writing code — it's giving maintainer time back. Time for code review with judgement instead of code review at midnight. Time for mentoring a contributor instead of typing the same triage reply for the hundredth time. Time for the conversations on dev@ that actually shape a project. The Apache Way — community over code, consensus, earned merit, public discussion — is fundamentally about how humans spend time together. Tooling that returns time to that loop strengthens the project; tooling that fakes participation hollows it out.
We'll cover concrete patterns ASF projects are converging on: AI for PR triage and labelling, AI-assisted release management, AI as a "first reader" for contributor onboarding — and the guardrails that keep accountability, attribution, and discussion where they belong: with people.
We have a proposal from over 20 ASF members to create a new TLP - Apache Magpie—which is pending review by the Apache Software Board, intended to serve as a starting point for maintainers of Open Source projects (not only Apache Software Foundation ones).
Jarek Potiuk is an Apache Software Foundation member, long-time Apache Airflow committer and PMC member, and a contributor to the ASF Security team's ecosystem-wide tooling efforts. He has spent the last several years working on the human side of open-source scale — release management, security triage, contributor onboarding — and most recently on apache-magpie, a shared framework that lets ASF projects adopt AI-assisted skills without giving up the principles of the Apache Way. He believes maintainers' time is the scarcest resource in open source.