The million dollar question: What do open source maintainers actually need?
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CodeRabbit's DevRel lead Erik Thorelli discusses why cash sponsorships matter more than free tools for open source sustainability, with CodeRabbit pledging $1 million to maintainers this year. Their AI code review tool is free for public GitHub repos and is used by nearly 100,000 open source projects. Erik argues AI augments developers rather than replacing them, drawing parallels to compilers and higher-level languages. He also shares his personal tool stack evolution, including switching to Zed IDE, Ghostty terminal, and exploring Bun for JavaScript tooling.
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Why CodeRabbit chose cash over free tools and how AI will actually augment developer work.Key takeawaysMore from We Love Open SourceAbout the AuthorSort: