Happy February, folks. Kate, here.

The RedMonk crew kicked off 2026 the only way we know how: racking up frequent flyer miles and hanging with our tech friends. January saw us bouncing around the West Coast in San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Seattle attending conferences and doing in-person consulting.  

The analysts have also been in full research mode. The thing that's been rattling around in my brain is “AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers.” AI slop, in open source terms, is what happens when someone pastes a GitHub issue into their agentic IDE, and submits the response without checking it for quality or relevance. Maintainers are being overwhelmed by a flood of AI generated contributions, bug reports, and suggestions. If you haven't been following this slop-talk, Daniel Stenberg, founder of the curl project, joined me on the MonkCast to chat with me about what he’s seeing on the front lines, and it’s well worth a listen. TLDR: AI slop is creating real headaches for the people who keep the open source infrastructure we all depend on running.

After publishing my piece, several maintainers from across the ecosystem reached out to share their own horror stories about AI slop and how they’re dealing with it. But here's where it gets interesting: more solutions started to emerge too. Mitchell Hashimoto, for instance, dropped Vouch, a contributor trust management system aimed squarely at this problem. And Angie Jones wrote a fantastic guide with concrete steps maintainers can take to reduce the overhead and improve quality of submissions. This is what I love about oss. The community isn't just complaining; it's building.

This feels like one of those inflection points we'll look back on. The intersection of generative AI and open source sustainability is getting messy, and we're all figuring it out in real time.

Got thoughts? Seeing something similar in your world? Drop us a line.

- Kate

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Recent RedMonk Research

• Anthropic made waves dropping Cowork, which they’re marketing as “Claude Code for the rest of your work.” While the long-term adoption of terms like "AI coworker" and "AI teammate" in corporate vocabulary remains to be seen, in this RedMonk post, Kate Holterhoff argues that this moment in tech history is significant for revealing that we are all still grappling with how to talk about machines that might be genuinely good at their jobs, because we haven't quite figured out what that means for ours. Just don't expect your AI teammate to bring bagels to standup. RM clients mentioned: Google, Microsoft, GitHub, and Atlassian

• AI slop is ripping up the social contract between maintainers and contributors essential to open source development. Practitioners have been repeatedly assured that AI would supercharge their communities, but so far that hasn’t been the case. In this post, Kate discusses the state of OSS in the era of AI slop, and how maintainers, many of whom are already burned out, are coping. RM clients mentioned: GitHub/ Microsoft and Google

• A week ago Steve O'Grady had five separate pieces going on AI trends as we rolled into 2026. The impact on communities, the impact on individuals, the crazy economics, the arguments that SaaS was dead and the stress on developer infrastructure. He decided to consolidate those so as to look at the impacts of AI more systematically. To try and take apart what it's doing, what it means for the industry, and how we might think about it moving forward. RM clients mentioned: GitHub (Copilot), Oxide, Red Hat (Open Shift) and Salesforce

Recent RedMonk Videos

• All of our talks from The 2025 Monktoberfest are published! Watch them all here.

• In this RedMonk conversation, Mark Fussell, CEO of Diagrid, discusses Dapr, a runtime designed to simplify the development of distributed applications, with James Governor: Mark Fussell on Dapr, Simple APIs, & Distributed Systems

• In this conversation, Rachel Stephens, the research director at RedMonk, discusses the evolution of observability in the tech industry: Dynatrace and the Observability Market

• Modern software systems are frequently described as “complicated,” but that framing obscures the nature of the challenge. Complicated systems can be decomposed, reasoned about, and managed through clearer processes and better tooling. Complex systems cannot. They are shaped by a web of technical interdependencies, incentives, institutional history, and human behavior, and they often fail in ways that are difficult or impossible to predict. In this RedMonk Conversation, Rachel Stephens and guests David Pollak, Chris Petrilli, and Æva Black explore how complexity emerges across large organizations, open source ecosystems, and security-critical infrastructure: Complex, Not Complicated

• Wes Bos, co-host of Syntax, chats with Kate Holterhoff about why he predicts 2026 is the year design makes a comeback. They explore why the design of exceptional websites like landonorris.com can be a critical differentiator in the digital space, particularly as AI tools simplify the creation of visually appealing websites: Wes Bos on Why Design’s Making a Comeback in 2026

• In this conversation, Stephen O’Grady and Rob Hirschfeld discuss the complexities of bare metal automation, the role of platform teams, and the importance of observability and governance in managing infrastructure: Navigating Bare Metal Automation with Rob Hirschfeld

• In this RedMonk conversation, Kate Holterhoff chats with Daniel Stenberg, founder of the cURL project, about the challenges and implications of AI-generated code in open source software, particularly focusing on the phenomenon known as AI Slop: How Daniel Stenberg, founder of cURL, is Navigating the AI Onslop

Sponsorship Opportunities Available - Monki Gras 2026

Monki Gras, the intimate London conference about software, craft, and tech culture, returns on March 19th & 20th, 2026.

This year’s theme is Prepping Craft – being prepared in software and life.
In an era where uncertainty is the only certainty, we will explore the strategies that make people, communities, products, and platforms safer and more resilient. We’ll take a meta view, linking software testing strategies and resilience engineering directly to real-world preparedness, covering everything from managing cloud outages to living off-grid.

Interested in sponsoring the conference? Please reach out to Morgan Harris for availability!

Meet the Monks

Events we'll be attending:
Kubecon EU 2026: 23 - 26 March 2026, Amsterdam
SUSECON: 20 - 21 April 2026, Prague

Events we'll be hosting:
Monki Gras 2025: 27 - 28 March 2025, London, UK