Earlier this year I ran a cohort with over 100 mentees that was entirely focused on open-source contributions and emulating a real-world developer workflow. There were 14 teams, participants sent over 16,000 messages in the Discord, 651 contributions were reviewed... and then I ran an exit survey.

And that survey was telling: 71% of the participants used AI to augment their work, 58% wished I provided better guidelines around how to do so... this was the lowest rated portion of the experience when I polled participants at the end of the cohort.

I want to share my boots-on-the-ground experience, what the data show, how AI helped our participants stay engaged, and how it harmed my ability to identify skill gaps that led to churn.

Mentorship becomes increasingly important as AI shifts the playing field of our industry, and as MCP-enabled tooling reshapes what "AI-augmented workflow" means. The lessons I learned from this cohort belong to every maintainer.

The key takeaway? AI is drastically impacting the shape of the open source ecosystem. It's the core of the gap between contributors who stay and contributors who churn. And we need to adapt to the ever-changing agentic AI domain.