A recent Revo PR flood raised an interesting question by a longtime community member and ultra-helpful (and pervasive!) forum contributor, @halftrainedharry. In short, he asked about the origin of such a high volume of PRs over just a few days and the subsequent reviews.
To say that AI can be transformative and disruptive—in both the good and bad sense—would be an understatement. It can help create amazing things at a pace that’s never been possible. It can also create pretty big distractions and cause very real problems.
We’re Embracing AI
For site owners, there is modAI, due its 1.0 release in the coming weeks. We’ve seen 10× productivity gains internally using modAI on parts of modx.com and there is still more to come.
For code contributors, there is a lot to work through as we adapt for a project that’s literally been around for decades. We must be very intentional to preserve our unmatched security track record amongst mainstream open source CMSes.
As Siddhant Khare so eloquently stated, “The cruel irony is that AI-generated code requires more careful review than human-written code … So you read every line. And reading code you didn’t write, that was generated by a system that doesn’t understand your codebase’s history or your team’s conventions, is exhausting work.”
We’re appreciative of Ivan’s and Nikolay’s efforts and this discussion is aimed at helping us come to a conclusion on how we’re going to move forward.
What AI Means for MODX Development and Governance
A variety of areas will be addressed in the near future, including:
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Code Reviews – Tools like Copilot can help with PR reviews, but they have to be properly configured to prevent overwhelming reviewers and code owners. Please see Siddhant Khare’s exceptional AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it article, quoted above, if you haven’t already.
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AI Policies and Project Governance – Ghostty has a solid take on this area, especially in their CONTRIBUTING.md, HACKING.md, and AI_POLICY.md docs at https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty
It’s virtually guaranteed that the next iterations in process and governance will morph and expand over time to encourage higher levels of contribution, collaboration, and cadence.
How You Can Help Today
Reviewing, testing and providing constructive feedback on PRs is huge. Feel free to draft with all the AI-assistance you want, but please distill that into easily-digested feedback. This will in turn lead to PRs that are faster to accept and integrate.
It also goes without saying that contributing to the MODX Open Collective can help provide funding for helping make MODX software better for everyone. The budget we have to work with there has to be very diligently managed, though. It could easily be a full-time job for an entire team to manage the Revo codebase and releases.
On behalf of everyone at MODX, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
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