The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out
Summary
The article argues that open source quality has degraded due to mass AI-generated contributions and proposes a modern, guild-like trust system to vet contributors. It advocates a decentralized, reputation-based approach (Web of Trust) to balance openness with accountability, drawing lessons from medieval guilds and Debian-style trust models. This has implications for AI tool ecosystems, no-code automation, and software project governance.