ESLint ends its four-year paid contributor program over AI pull requests

ESLint is ending the paid contributor pool it ran for four years. Creator Nicholas C. Zakas announced the decision on the ESLint blog on 13 November. He said the program is stopping because AI-written pull requests have made the pool unworkable. The maintainers can no longer tell which contributions deserve to be paid.

The program started in 2022. Zakas set aside $1,000 a month for people outside the core team who did meaningful work. He later changed the rule to 10 percent of monthly income. Over four years the project paid out $51,180: $7,900 in 2022, $4,500 in 2023, $14,100 in 2024 and $24,680 in 2025. Zakas said the cost was not the problem. Payouts were growing and the program was doing what it was meant to do.

What changed

Zakas said the volume of AI-generated issues and pull requests grew through 2025. The team debated whether AI-assisted contributions should qualify for payment. ESLint's policy required contributors to disclose when they used AI. In practice, Zakas said, many did not.

He also described a second pressure. Public "AI monitors" appeared. They called out submissions they suspected were AI-written. That added work for the maintainers, who had to judge each case. In the post Zakas said the pool was not meant for this kind of work. He wrote that pointing tokens at ESLint and asking for a fix was not what the program tried to attract.

The quote that ends the program

"All of this took the joy out of the contributor pool," Zakas wrote. He added that open source has changed and the project needs to change with it. The pool was meant to reward people for their time on the project. An AI-written pull request does not cost the submitter the same time. The money is still there. The maintainers cannot be sure what it is paying for.

What other projects are trying

Socket, which first reported the change, said other large projects have taken a different route. They have tightened their AI policies rather than paying people at all. Godot now requires contributors to show they understand the code they submit, even if an AI wrote part of it. Socket cites Godot's yearly survey. In 2024, 55 percent of contributors said AI tools should be allowed. In 2025, 30 percent said so. A written policy is one tool. Checking every pull request against it takes a maintainer's time.

ESLint is one of the most installed JavaScript tools in the world. A team that uses it is not affected by the change. A developer who has been paid in the past will not be paid for new submissions after 13 November. The deeper point is that a working funding model for open source has just failed. The project could no longer tell a person's work apart from a model's. Every project that pays contributors per piece of work has the same decision to make now.

Source

Retiring the contributor pool, by Nicholas C. Zakas at ESLint; ESLint ends paid contributor program as AI upends open source collaboration, by Sarah Gooding at Socket.