Free Work Arrives Postage Due

An AI wrote two patches for me this month, as a side effect of making one advertising video. Both were small fixes to an open-source video tool with fifty thousand stars, which my studio runs in production. One made a file load through the right path. The other taught the captions to break Japanese lines where Japanese actually breaks, instead of putting a space between every word and cutting words in half. Writing them took minutes. Deciding what to do with them took an afternoon, and that ratio is not a story about open source. When making something costs nothing, the cost does not disappear. It moves to the person who has to decide what the thing is worth.

The queue that broke first

Open-source maintainers hit this before the rest of us. In January the maintainer of curl shut down the project's six-year-old bug bounty because AI-generated reports had flooded the security queue. Jazzband, a Python collective, stopped operating this year, its lead naming AI spam among the reasons. Ghostty now takes AI-assisted contributions only against issues it has approved in advance. Nothing was stolen in any of these cases and nobody was attacked. People sent free work, in volume, and the projects closed the door because they could not afford to read it. The cost of producing something plausible fell to zero; the cost of reading it carefully did not move at all. Free code stopped being a gift somewhere in that gap. It became work, addressed to a stranger, postage due.

What evidence buys

So I spent the afternoon on everything except the code. The claim that both patches run in production, daily, on real Japanese ad videos. A before screenshot showing the stray spaces and a word cut in half, an after showing clean breaks — same input, one variable changed. A note on what I deliberately did not touch, and on the one limitation the design accepts. A disclosure that an AI wrote them, that a named person reviewed them, and that the same person would answer the review comments. None of it could be generated in minutes, which is the entire source of its value.

Both patches were merged within the week. The review was one sentence each, and both sentences were about scope: low risk, narrow, leaves the existing behavior alone. Neither mentioned production, the screenshots or the disclosure. I had assembled the evidence expecting it to earn trust. What it bought was smaller than trust and more useful — a decision that could be made in a minute and never revisited. In a queue where everything looks equally competent, that is what a sender can actually give. Not proof that the work is good. A cheap way to find out.

The same bill, in your inbox

The transfer is not specific to code. The proposal, the job application, the market analysis, the agency deck — each of them now costs almost nothing to produce and the same as ever to judge. Polish has stopped carrying information, because polish is free. I notice the change in myself as a reader more than as a sender. I skim the argument now and go looking for the attachments: where this number came from and whether I can query the same source, whether the thing has run anywhere outside the document, whose name is on it and whether that person will still be reachable when it turns out to be wrong. None of that is a judgment about quality. It is a measure of how expensive the sender has made my decision.

Nobody is paid to attach it

There is an uncomfortable second half to this. The old selfish reason to send a patch upstream — carrying your local changes across every update is painful — is dying, killed by the same tool that wrote the patch. My studio vendors its dependencies and lets the AI reapply our local changes on each update, so the cost of never contributing anything has fallen to roughly zero. Upstreaming has become almost purely a civic act, and attaching evidence is the same kind of act: it takes an afternoon, and the sender who attaches nothing has sent ten more things by the time you finish. Which means the shortage and the flood have one cause. The people with the least reason to send anything find it effortless, and the people with something worth sending have lost their reason to bother.

Trust used to be the default and review the formality. Now review is the scarce thing, and evidence is how you pay for the review you are asking a stranger to perform. Nothing enforces this and nobody is rewarded for it. It survives as a private habit, which is a thin foundation for a commons, and at the moment it is the one the commons has.