The AI and open source conversation usually starts with spam PRs and bot noise. That framing misses the point. Maintainer burnout, inconsistent governance, and sustainability gaps were already there. AI didn't break community health. It made the cracks impossible to ignore.

In this co-presented talk, we reframe AI engagement not as a novel threat requiring novel solutions, but as urgency we can finally use to pay down longstanding community health debt: Codes of Conduct that never defined "good faith," CONTRIBUTING docs that assumed human intent, repo configs that left maintainers as the last line of defense.

We'll share what we changed across GitHub practices and structural guardrails, and be honest about what worked and what didn't.

Attendees leave with adaptable governance language, repo hardening patterns, and a framework for treating AI engagement as a community health signal rather than a standalone crisis.