GitHub invented pull requests, and for 18 years they have been open by default. But now some of the top AI-native open source projects are shutting PRs off, because they’ve found a better way. These projects, which include Flue and tldraw, refuse to accept PRs from external contributors — in part because they’re usually AI-generated. Instead, the maintainers prefer to use their own agents to create and manage PRs. Also, many projects have begun using a “software factory” to manage community contributions. Typically this involves a ‘team’ of agents triaging a PR, reproducing the issue (if it’s