Ladybird will stop accepting public pull requests, limiting code changes to maintainers

Ladybird, the independent open-source browser project led by Andreas Kling, will stop accepting public pull requests. In a post published on June 5, 2026, Kling said that from now on code changes to the Ladybird codebase will be introduced only by project maintainers, and that every currently open public pull request will be closed.

A tighter process ahead of the first alpha

The project presents the decision as a structural change on the way to its first alpha release. According to the post, Ladybird needs a tighter development process, a clearer security model and a smaller set of people responsible for the code that enters the browser. Kling acknowledges that many valuable contributions have arrived from outside the maintainer group over the years, and notes that many maintainers themselves entered open source by sending patches to projects they cared about.

AI has changed the economics of contribution

The stated reason is that AI tooling has weakened the signal a pull request used to carry. "A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith," Kling writes. "That assumption no longer holds." The project says it uses AI tools itself every day, and stresses that the question is not whether code was typed by hand.

For a browser, the post argues, the stakes are different: a browser runs untrusted input from the entire internet on the user's machine, and one well-disguised vulnerability is all an attacker needs. Ladybird says patient, well-resourced campaigns to earn maintainer trust and then abuse it have already been seen in open source; what has changed is how fast and how cheap it has become to produce work that looks like a serious contribution.

No shadow contribution channel

The project will not create an alternative way to submit patches through issues, comments, email or forks, and forks or patch dumps will not be treated as an upstream review queue. Ladybird remains open source, with the source code publicly available under its license. Kling lists clear bug reports, reductions, website testing, standards and design discussion, security reports and technical feedback as the ways outside contributors can still help.