# The bug reports got better, and that's the problem

> Curl killed its bug bounty in January over AI slop. By April the slop was gone and maintainers had more work than ever — because the thing they were filtering for was never correctness.

Published: 2026-07-18
Tags: open-source, code-review, ai, security
Canonical: https://aaronchartier.com/blog/the-bug-reports-got-better-and-thats-the-problem

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curl's Daniel Stenberg [ended a bug bounty program he had run since 2019](https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/26/the-end-of-the-curl-bug-bounty/) on January 26: 87 confirmed vulnerabilities, over $100,000 paid out, and a confirmed-vulnerability rate that had held above 15% for years before collapsing below 5% in 2025. Fewer than one in twenty submissions were real. The rest were AI-written reports plausible enough to demand a response and empty enough to waste one. Stenberg described the toll on his team's attention as a serious mental cost, not just a workflow annoyance, and pulled the money off the table entirely rather than keep paying people to waste his time.

Two months later the slop stopped. Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman put it plainly in March: "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." Stenberg confirmed the same thing for curl in April — the obviously fake AI reports had vanished, and in their place came a steady stream of genuinely competent security write-ups, most of them AI-assisted. Nobody fully knows why; Kroah-Hartman's best guess is some mix of better models and reporters finally doing the work. Either way, this should have been the good ending. It wasn't. The reports arrive faster than anyone can evaluate them. Every one now demands a real technical read instead of a two-second dismissal. The workload went up, not down.

That reversal is the tell. What curl, Ghostty, and half of GitHub spent the preceding months building wasn't a correctness filter — it was an effort filter, and those are different instruments wearing the same clothes. Mitchell Hashimoto named the actual mechanism in the [pull request that tightened Ghostty's contribution policy](https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/10412) in January: "the rise of agentic programming has eliminated the natural effort-based backpressure that previously limited low-effort contributions." For twenty years, the cost of writing a plausible patch or bug report was itself a weak proxy for its merit. Bad actors had to spend real time to look credible, so credibility and effort traveled together. Agentic tools broke that pairing at zero marginal cost. Ghostty's fix substitutes identity for effort: AI contributions restricted to pre-approved issues, then an explicit vouch-and-denounce system where only vetted contributors can submit at all. GitHub [shipped literal caps](https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/how-pull-request-limits-are-cutting-down-the-noise/) on how many open pull requests a non-maintainer can hold at once. Kubernetes' guidelines made it a hard rule: if you can't personally explain your own AI-assisted change, the PR gets closed, no further discussion. All three are the same move — replace a broken cost signal with an explicit one, because the informal kind stopped being informal.

None of that is new, if you squint. Code review itself was already doing double duty as a correctness check before continuous integration existed to take half the job. A human reviewer used to have to eyeball whether the tests even ran. CI split that apart, machine-checkable claims went to the machine. Review narrowed to the part that actually needed judgment — is this the right design, does this fit the system. What's happening to open-source contribution now is the same split arriving one layer up. The gates built this spring — caps, vouch lists, disclosure rules — filter identity and volume. They do nothing to verify a claim once the claim looks competent, which is exactly the case Kroah-Hartman is describing.

The honest counterpoint sits inside the same story. Linus Torvalds, [answering the anti-AI mood on the kernel mailing list](https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/15/linus-torvalds-tells-ai-haters-to-fork-off/5271894) in July, proposed no machinery at all: decisions made primarily on technical merit, and anyone who objects can do the open-source thing and fork. His bet is that the kernel's existing review culture, brutal as it already is, doesn't need new bureaucracy to survive better inputs; it needs to keep doing what it does. He might be right for a project with that much existing review depth. Most projects don't have it, which is exactly why Ghostty and Kubernetes went the other way.

The caps and vouch lists win the argument about spam. They lose the argument about the actual bottleneck. They'll stay, because they're cheap and they do stop the volume problem. But volume was never the expensive part — verification was, and identity gates don't verify anything. The fix that scales is the one CI already proved: push a checkable artifact into the submission itself, a reproduction case or a working patch, not a disclosure checkbox. Make the reporter's tooling do more of the proving. That's the actual gate. Everything else is a better bouncer at a door that was never the problem.