An Open-Source Maintainer's Guide to Saying No By Mostly Harmless, September 12, 2025 --- Overview Maintaining an open-source project demands tough decisions, especially when saying “no” to good ideas. Even well-designed, useful feature proposals must sometimes be declined to protect the project's vision and coherence. --- Key Insights from Experience Stewardship Over Features: The success of a project depends more on a coherent vision and alignment with users' mental models than sheer feature count. As Chris White (Prefect CTO) states, software wins when its abstractions fit its users' thinking. Clarity of Purpose: Documenting not just how but why the project exists helps filter contributions, setting clear expectations and attracting contributors who share the vision. This shared philosophy serves as a defense against misaligned contributions. The Impact of LLMs: The rise of Large Language Models has shifted the code contribution dynamic. Previously, due to coding effort, contributors usually discussed ideas before coding. Now, contributors often submit fully formed PRs without context—work that may not fit the project's philosophy and requires more maintainer effort to evaluate. Handling Unsolicited Contributions: While thoughtfully aligned drive-by PRs are welcome, the balance has shifted toward more low-effort, high-review contributions due to AI-generated code prevalence. Process tweaks like requiring associated issues for PRs can help but may lead to minimal effort "ticket before PR" patterns. Maintainer Burden and Responsibility: Merging code transfers responsibility to maintainers for ongoing maintenance and bug fixes. FastMCP introduced a contrib module for features maintained solely by their authors, allowing the core project to remain focused and maintainable. --- Reflections on Community Engagement Early engagement practices (like a 15-minute SLA on user questions) have faded as low-effort contributions grow. Clear, direct questions with Minimal Reproducible Examples (MRE) remain more appreciated than verbose AI-generated submissions. The approach described is artisanal and deliberate, contrasting with ephemeral "vibe coding." Thoughtful stewardship is critical to produce projects that truly serve users and remain sustainable. --- An Inspiring Example: The MCP Committee The author recently attended the MCP Committee meetings in New York, witnessing high-level stewardship in action. MCP, a young AI protocol, faces pressure to become all-encompassing but maintains a disciplined focus on its core purpose. The committee's rigorous debate and insistence on philosophical alignment ("Is this what a protocol should do?") exemplify mature project guardianship. This experience reassures that principled open-source stewardship is alive and crucial, especially for emerging technologies. --- Conclusion Saying "no" to good ideas is often the hardest but most necessary act for open-source maintainers striving for coherent, maintainable projects aligned with user needs and project philosophy. Thoughtful stewardship fosters stronger communities, better software, and lasting impact. --- Tags AI MCP (Model Communication Protocol) OSS (Open Source Software) --- About the Author The author has created and maintained several successful open-source projects including Prefect and FastMCP, contributed to Apache Airflow, and Theano. --- External Links Prefect GitHub FastMCP GitHub Chris White LinkedIn David's Twitter --- Subscribe for more insights on open source and software stewardship.