💻 SWC closed external pull requests due to a flood of AI code
On October 1, 2026, the official @swc_rs account wrote on X: "Due to AI-generated pull requests, we're no longer accepting external PRs". The post received about 375 likes and 13 replies. On October 2, the project author clarified in a thread: after a comment from a GitHub employee, he reconsidered the decision and is "considering the possibility of reopening PRs for a trusted group of contributors". The thread made it to Hacker News on October 3.
🌍 SWC is an infrastructure project: a TypeScript/JavaScript compiler written in Rust, which powers Next.js, Parcel, and Deno and is used by Vercel, ByteDance, Tencent, and Shopify. The case shows a specific mechanism: "AI slop" — low-quality machine-generated contributions — eats up review time on filtering out noise instead of development. The step back is also notable: in a day, the project moved from a complete closure of PRs to discussing a whitelist of trusted contributors. This is still a single, n=1 case, not a platform shift, but a clear example of a maintainer's actions against AI spam.
👤 If you have sent or plan to send a PR to swc-project/swc — external PRs are currently not accepted, and a possible reopen will only affect "trusted contributors", meaning a one-time contribution will most likely be missed. Practice for contributors: describe manual work, link PRs to issues, and honestly indicate the use of AI. The case suggests to maintainers of their own projects to pre-define rules against AI spam instead of emergency repository closure.
Source 1: https://x.com/swc_rs/status/2105505428893544847
Source 2: https://x.com/swc_rs/status/2105824152322200046