OSS has a toil problem, and three projects solved it
OSS has a toil problem, and three projects solved it
Manual, repetitive, and automatable. Scales linearly with the user base. That's the Google SRE definition of toil, and it's a fair description of how most open source maintainers spend their time. The interesting part is what specifically gets scaled when toil is removed. Across Docling, Bluefin, and ask.cncf.io, we saw three trends emerge. Response time scaled (Bluefin from 42 hours to 12 minutes). Knowledge access scaled (ask.cncf.io answered 765 questions across 200+ CNCF projects at KubeCon). Triage capacity scaled (Docling automating 70% of incoming issues with four maintainers). Code generation, governance, and team size stayed exactly the same.
This talk gets specific about how to build with those learnings in mind. AGENTS.md and six specific areas can change agent behavior, (surprise, poorly written AGENTS.md files hurt more than they help). You'll learn about how to craft instruction files that teach agents to review like the project's maintainers and how to think about freshness scoring for docs.
Bio
Taylor Dolezal is Head of Open Source Software at Dosu, where he leads community engagement and maintainer relationships across the 50,000+ projects Dosu supports. Before Dosu, Taylor spent three years as Head of Ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, served as Kubernetes 1.19 Release Lead, and created the End User Technical Advisory Board and the Zero to Merge contributor pipeline. Earlier roles include Senior Developer Advocate at HashiCorp and Lead SRE at Walt Disney Studios. He co-authored O'Reilly's Terraform Cookbook and is based in Los Angeles.
About the host Chris Mazur
Helping to connect the Software Development Community in the Southern Hemisphere since 2011. Software & DevOps Engineer, CNCF Ambassador.
Building communities, one Mate 🧉 ( or a coffee ☕ ;) at a time!
https://mate.dev/chris
If you’d like to support the running costs of this community - such as Mailchimp, Zoom, domains, cloud services, and other expenses for in person meetups - please consider buying me a coffee here: https://buymeacoffee.com/matedev
Thank you!!!
Chris