2026-07-17 –, Memorial Hall
AI tool adoption is outpacing our ability to thoughtfully decide how, when, and whether to use it. Researchers, maintainers, and contributors are reacting in real time both to the use of AI tools in open source development and to the flood of AI-assistance contributions that continue to strain human open source infrastructure. Peer-review programs like pyOpenSci and JOSS, along with maintainer teams across the ecosystem, are being forced to react by creating guardrails and protection systems on the fly. The result of this is a difficult combination of introduced technical debt caused by the unguided use of AI tools in software development, burnout across volunteer teams who are fielding rapid AI-assisted contributions, and polarization around whether AI tools have a productive place in open source community at all.
pyOpenSci has received support from the Sloan Foundation to better understand the challenges and opportunities that AI tools present for scientific open source. Grounded in the idea that AI represents a collaboration between humans and analytic tools — where human judgment drives which tool, when, and how — we'll facilitate small-group discussions to collect real stories of impacts, from across our collective community. Whether you're a researcher considering AI tools in your workflow, a maintainer fielding AI-assisted contributions, or a contributor navigating new expectations, this session is for you. Help us shape the resources and frameworks we'll develop over the next six months — and learn how to get involved.
About pyOpenSci
pyOpenSci broadens participation in scientific open source by breaking down social and technical barriers. Our community works together to make participation in open source more accessible to everyone, everywhere. We run an open peer review process for scientific Python software and develop accessible, open learning resources that tackle common challenges—like software development, packaging, and the use of AI tools in scientific open source—in support of open and reproducible scientific discovery.
