Hono closed external pull requests on October 5, five days after Sindre Sorhus did the same across his libraries

An open-source JavaScript framework with 32,418 GitHub stars just stopped taking patches from anybody except its own maintainers. Hono merged the change on October 5, and the author's own note said that pull requests "don't work in this era."

The change is in PR #5526, merged by Yusuke Wada at 07:49 UTC on October 5. The new wording in docs/CONTRIBUTING.md reads: "Pull requests are limited to maintainers. If you find a bug or want a change, please create an issue instead. A clear issue with a minimal reproduction helps us more than a pull request." A fork can still carry a fix; the policy adds that a maintainer may open a pull request from a linked branch and the original author keeps their commits.

What Hono's AI policy says

The same CONTRIBUTING.md keeps an existing section titled "AI Usage Policy." It reads: "You may use AI to contribute, but it must never waste a maintainer's time or make their work unpleasant. To enforce this, and regardless of whether AI was actually used, a maintainer may close your issue without notice and block your account." The old version of that line referred to closing a PR; the new wording covers issues, because an outside contributor can no longer open a PR to begin with.

Yusuke Wada's own statement, as quoted on the Hacker News essay that carried the story, said: "Sad news. We disabled PRs from external contributors on honojs/hono... Hono has not stood here without PRs. I will never forget the PR @usualoma created for RegExpRouter. A damn fast HTTP router we have never seen! But PRs don't work in this era. Contribute in other ways."

Other popular projects that stopped taking outside PRs this year

The Hono change arrives in a week of similar moves across popular projects. The Hacker News discussion carrying the story is a post titled "Open Source as We Know It Is Dead" by James Ross, which ran on October 6 and sat at 79 points when this item was written. Ross's post gathers the recent announcements and attributes them to AI-generated contribution volume.

Named in the piece: Sindre Sorhus disabled external pull requests across all of his repositories on October 1 and wrote "Open source, as we have known it, was fun while it lasted." Daniel Stenberg of curl ended the project's monetary bug bounty earlier in the year after real reports fell below 5 percent of submissions. tldraw now auto-closes external PRs. OpenJDK banned contributions generated by language models. Ladybird stopped accepting public pull requests. Godot requires human-authored code. Codeberg members voted to ban mostly AI-generated projects. GitHub itself shipped a repository setting in February that lets a project turn pull requests off entirely, and has added caps on open PRs per user since.

For a team shipping software that depends on open-source libraries, the practical cost is review time: a maintainer who used to merge an outside patch in an afternoon now has an issue tracker to read, and the patch waits for the maintainer to open the PR from the forked branch. Keep a list of the dependencies whose maintainers your team has reached by name, so an urgent fix on one of them has a route that an opened issue alone does not give you.

Source

• Primary: honojs, PR #5526 "docs(contributing): ask for issues instead of RPs" on GitHub, merged by Yusuke Wada at 07:49 UTC on 5 October 2026
• Reporting: James Ross, "Open Source as We Know It Is Dead" on jross.me, 6 October 2026, with the Hacker News thread