DEV Community: Max

I let the internet vote on what code gets merged weekly. Week 2: they voted to merge every day.

Max — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 10:47:29 +0000

Last Sunday, I merged the first community PR. This Sunday, the community voted to merge every day.

The experiment: OpenChaos is a repo where anyone submits a PR, the community votes with GitHub reactions, and the most-voted PR gets merged. Everything can be changed — including the rules.

The Numbers

Metric	Week 1	Week 2	Change
Stars	400	690	+73%
Forks	35	57	+63%
Open PRs	30	45	+50%

Monday: The Invisible Ballot

GitHub's API returns 30 results by default. We had 40+ open PRs.

Older PRs—including #13 (Rust rewrite) and #47 (IE6 mode)—weren't showing on the leaderboard. People couldn't vote on what they couldn't see.

I merged the fix immediately.

Some will say I broke my own rules. But a bug that hides PRs isn't chaos. It's just broken. You can't vote on whether to see the ballot. The voting booth has to work first.

The precedent: Content waits for Sunday. Infrastructure ships when it breaks.

Tuesday: The Rust Wars

Two PRs. Same meme. Very different execution.

PR #13: "Rewrite it in rust" by @wvanlit was Week 1's runner-up. 458 upvotes. One problem: it didn't build.

But sometime this week, it started passing CI. The meme became real.

The comments were split:

"less js => less bugs"

vs.

"Fewer people can read/write Rust. It's going to make it harder to contribute for no real gain."

vs.

"More screw ups = more chaos."

Then @bpottle pulled the branch to investigate. His assessment:

"I was astonished it has as many upvotes as it does. They're all because of the title. This is a branch that got halfway through a beer and remembered it had chores to do."

So he wrote PR #91: "Rewrite it in Rust (for real)". Thirteen commits. Axum backend. Proper async. Real architecture.

It got 18 upvotes.

Lesson: Democracy doesn't reward effort. It rewards memes.

Wednesday: The Quiet Coup

While everyone watched the Rust drama, PR #51: "Chaos each day" was climbing.

A simple change: merge daily instead of weekly.

By Wednesday, it passed the Rust rewrite. By Thursday, it led by 300+ votes. By Sunday morning, 788.

@matthewmayer called me the "benevolent dictator" and asked what time worked for me. I said 09:00 UTC — it gets me out of bed.

@BetonZM updated the PR to 9:00.

The community votes on what. The maintainer sets when. Governance is emerging.

One comment summed up the vibe:

"let there be chaos. after this - vibe code merge every hour."

Thursday: The Math

I ran the numbers. With #51 winning, here's what the next week looked like:

Day	PR	What Ships
Sun 09:00	#51	Daily merges enabled
Mon 09:00	#13	Rust rewrite
Tue 09:00	#47	IE6 GeoCities mode
Wed 09:00	#8	PR health indicators
Thu 09:00	#52	Show age of PRs
Fri 09:00	#60	Hall of Chaos
Sat 09:00	#11	Inverted light/dark mode

Seven merges in seven days instead of seven weeks. That was Thursday's math.

And by day nine? PR #63: "Add Automatic Merge" enters the queue. GitHub Actions. No human trigger.

The community didn't just vote for more chaos. They voted for exponential chaos.

Sunday: The Second Merge

January 18, 2026. 09:00 UTC.

PR #51: "Chaos each day" merged with +788 votes.

The next merge happens tomorrow at 09:00 UTC. The Rust rewrite is next — if it can resolve its merge conflicts. Otherwise, 1999 comes early.

Final Standings

Rank	PR	Net Votes	Status
1	#51 — Chaos each day	+788	✅ Merged
2	#13 — Rewrite in Rust	+458	Merge conflicts
3	#47 — IE6 GeoCities mode	+319	Queued
4	#8 — PR health indicators	+185	Queued
5	#52 — Show age of PRs	+108	Queued

What's Next

By next Sunday, OpenChaos could be:

Written in Rust
Styled like 1999
Running without me

I have no idea what it becomes. That's the whole point.

What's emerging

1. Velocity wins votes.

The daily merge PR wasn't clever or funny. It just promised more chaos, faster. That was enough.

2. The queue is the roadmap.

With daily merges, you can see the next week of changes lined up. The suspense shifts from what wins to what survives.

3. Governance emerges from chaos.

The first community merge added downvotes. The second changed the merge schedule. The community's first instinct isn't destruction—it's building the system that controls the chaos.

They're not breaking the game. They're writing the rules.

Week 2 of ∞.

The next merge is tomorrow.

— Max (@skridlevsky)

openchaos.dev · GitHub

I built a waiting room for developers. 45 people showed up in 12 hours.

Max — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 10:25:02 +0000

Yesterday I launched available.dev on Reddit.

The idea: a public waiting room where developers who are available for work just... sit. Visible. No resumes, no applications, no "open to work" badges. Just a room.

You sign in with GitHub, write a one-liner about yourself, and wait. Employers browse freely. When you find work, you leave.

That's it. That's the product.

Why I built this

Job hunting feels broken.

You send 50 applications into the void. Maybe 3 respond. LinkedIn is a game of who can post the most "thrilled to announce" updates. Recruiters spam everyone with "exciting opportunities" that turn out to be 6-month contracts in a city you don't live in.

I wanted something stupidly simple. If you're available, be visible. If you're hiring, look.

What happened

I posted on r/webdev's Showoff Saturday.

Within 12 hours:

2,100+ visitors
102 GitHub signups
45 developers entered the room
364 upvotes

Fair. I built it in roughly a day. It broke twice during launch. Someone found an infinite API loop. The site went down during the traffic spike.

Classic.

But 45 people still joined. React devs, Python engineers, DevOps folks. Seniors with 15 years experience. Juniors looking for their first role. All sitting in a public room, waiting.

How it works

Click "Enter the Room"
Sign in with GitHub (extracts your avatar, username, account age)
Write a one-liner (140 chars max)
Pick your skills
You're in the room

No resume. No cover letter. No profile optimization. Just availability.

The room updates in realtime. Watch people join, leave, or disappear when they find work.

What's missing

Honestly? Employers.

Right now it's 45 developers staring at each other. The Reddit traffic was 99% devs. Which makes sense — that's who's on r/webdev.

So this is my ask:

If you're hiring — take 2 minutes to browse the room. No signup needed. Just look. You might find someone.

If you're available — join. Worst case, you sit in a room with other devs who get it.

What's next

Based on Reddit feedback (the constructive parts):

Adding "last active" timestamps so employers know who's fresh
Adding location/seniority fields
Open-sourcing the codebase

The goal isn't to replace LinkedIn. It's to be the place you check when you have a role to fill. "Let me see who's in the waiting room."

Simple. Direct. No bullshit.

Stack (for the curious): Next.js 16, Supabase, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Vercel.

👉 available.dev

What Happened When I Let the Internet Decide What Code Gets Merged (Week 1)

Max — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:56:50 +0000

How a repo let the internet decide what gets shipped—and what happened next.

January 5, 2026, 23:12 UTC. I pushed a commit. A simple Next.js app with a countdown timer and a list of pull requests.

The rules were simple:

Anyone submits a PR
Community votes with thumbs-up reactions
Most-voted PR gets merged every Sunday
Everything can be changed—including the rules

I called it OpenChaos.

Six days later, it hit #1 on Hacker News.

This is the story of Week 1.

The Numbers

Metric	Value
Stars	400+
Forks	35+
Pull Requests	70+
Closed as spam	29
Open and competing	30+
Hours on HN front page	17+

Day 1: Bootstrap

The MVP took one night. A countdown timer. A list of open PRs. Vote counts pulled from GitHub's reaction API.

I submitted the first PR myself: dark mode toggle. Because every project needs a dark mode debate.

Within hours, I wasn't alone.

Day 2: The Nihilist Arrives

PR #2: "Vote to shut it down"

@Salman-Sali submitted a PR that would delete everything. 7,108 lines removed. The description was empty.

Someone commented:

"the people who upvote this are probably trump supporters"

Salman-Sali replied:

"hey mister, its not me who chose chaos"

The PR failed CI. Democracy had guardrails.

But the story wasn't over.

Day 3: The Frontrunner Emerges

PR #6: "Calculate +1 and -1 reactions"

@yokeTH submitted a feature that would change everything: count downvotes, not just upvotes. Net score determines the winner.

It was a genuine improvement. It was also a weapon.

Because once downvotes counted, the "Vote to shut it down" PR started losing.

Day 4: I Broke My Own Rules

Here's where I have to be honest.

The site was showing wrong vote counts. PR #1 had 147 votes but displayed 30. GitHub's API paginates reactions, and I hadn't accounted for it.

I faced a choice:

Wait for someone to submit a fix and let the community vote on it
Push the fix directly so voting could work correctly

I pushed the fix.

Then I hit rate limiting (60 requests/hour without auth). Pushed another fix.

You can't vote on whether to count votes correctly. That's circular.

The voting system has to work before democracy can function. But every intervention is a small betrayal of the premise.

Day 4, Part 2: The Demonstration

@Kl0ven opened 30 identical PRs. All titled "should have use proper pagination :("

I thought it was spam. I closed them all.

@Kl0ven got one through: PR #45 "F, At least I tried"

Current votes: -4

It took me days to understand what they were doing.

GitHub's API returns 30 results by default. By flooding the repo with PRs, @Kl0ven pushed older submissions past that limit—making them vanish from the leaderboard entirely.

They weren't spamming. They were demonstrating a bug I didn't know existed.

They weren't wrong.

Day 5: The Dramatic Withdrawal

With downvotes now counting against him, @Salman-Sali made his move.

He closed his own PR. And left this message:

Thank you for all those who have supported me.

It is with great regret that I have to say that I am dropping out of this race.

The big money funded PRs have plotted against me. They want to calculate the negative votes too. The big money has influenced this election. I will not stand for this injustice.

Therefore I am dropping out of this race.

Someone replied:

"STOP THE COUNT!"

A GitHub PR had become political satire.

Day 5, Part 2: The Creator's Sacrifice

My dark mode PR was winning. 228 upvotes. It would be the first merge.

But something felt wrong.

I withdrew it.

"Withdrawing to keep the first merge purely community-driven. Let the chaos decide."

When someone asked why:

"Didn't feel right winning my own game."

The first merge had to belong to the community.

Day 6: The Meme Becomes Real

PR #13: "Rewrite it in rust"

Every project eventually gets this comment. @wvanlit decided to actually do it.

A full Rust rewrite, compiled to WASM, ready to ship.

There was just one problem: the Vercel build kept failing.

Module not found: Can't resolve '@/wasm/pkg/openchaos_wasm'

The meme was real. But it couldn't compile.

Community reaction:

"once this gets done, we can put this in the linux kernel"

Day 6: Hacker News

350+ points. 70+ comments. #1 on the front page.

The comments were beautiful:

"Twitch plays GitHub"
"Like Reddit but Nomic"
"Codified Dadaismus"
"It's an absurdist art software project, devoid of any consistent intent or purpose beyond the operating principles."

Someone asked what the point was.

The best reply:

"I don't think there's a point. You can always submit a point, if it gets voted you will have your point."

The First Merge

Sunday, January 12, 2026. 09:00:37 UTC.

I merged PR #6: "Calculate +1 and -1 reactions" by @yokeTH.

Final score: 903 upvotes

The first community-driven change to OpenChaos makes downvotes count.

The project that started with pure upvote democracy now has its first check on power.

The irony isn't lost on me.

Week 2 Begins

The leaderboard reset. New contenders emerged:

Rank	PR	What it does	Net
1	#13	Rewrite in Rust	+409
2	#51	Chaos each day (daily merges)	+365
3	#47	IE6 mode with Comic Sans	+179
4	#8	Show PR health indicators	+122
5	#11	Invert dark/light mode	+57

The Rust rewrite is leading Week 2. If someone fixes the build, the meme becomes reality.

What I Learned

1. People want to add structure to chaos.

The winning PR adds downvote counting. The third-place PR changes merge frequency. The community's first instinct is governance.

2. Memes become real.

"Rewrite it in Rust" is leading Week 2. It might actually happen.

3. Every system gets gamed.

Within 48 hours, people were discussing vote manipulation, last-minute bait-and-switch commits, and bot attacks. The security conversation started before the first merge.

4. Drama writes itself.

I didn't plan the political satire. I didn't script the dramatic withdrawal. The chaos created its own narrative.

5. Maintainers can't be neutral.

I tried to be hands-off. I ended up pushing infrastructure fixes and closing spam. @Kl0ven demonstrated a bug I'd missed. They weren't wrong.

What's Next

PR #13 could give us a Rust rewrite (if someone fixes the build)
PR #51 could change merges to daily
PR #47 could send us back to 1999

That's the point.

The rules can change the rules. The chaos is the feature.

400+ stars, a Hacker News front page, and the best GitHub drama I've ever seen.

I'll take it.

— Max (@skridlevsky)

openchaos.dev

Week 1 of ∞. See you Sunday.

I Built a Codebase That Evolves Itself Through Democracy

Max — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:19:45 +0000

I built OpenChaos - a codebase with no roadmap, no product manager, and every change decided by community vote.

How it works

Anyone submits a PR
Community votes with 👍 reactions on GitHub
Most-voted PR gets merged every Sunday
Only rule: CI must pass

Everything can be changed. Including the rules.

What happened in the first 24 hours

12+ PRs competing
Someone tried to delete everything (their PR fails CI - democracy has guardrails)
A full Rust rewrite appeared
Dark mode is leading with 150+ votes
Someone submitted dickbutt

I didn't expect any of this.

Why I built it

Most open source projects have a benevolent dictator. One person decides what ships.

OpenChaos has no dictator. The community decides. If they vote for chaos, chaos ships. If they vote for stability, stability wins.

It's basically Nomic for code - a game where the rules can change the rules.

The guardrails

Just one: Vercel has to build it to deploy.

That's the ceiling. Someone could change CI rules, remove tests, whatever - but if Vercel can't build it, it doesn't ship.

Someone could PR a database. Someone could remove features. Someone could rewrite everything in Rust (they're trying - it doesn't build yet).

First merge: Sunday

3 days from now, the first PR gets merged. Dark mode is winning, but anything could happen.

I have no idea what this becomes. That's the point.

Check it out: openchaos.dev

Repo: github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos

Vote on PRs: Just add 👍 to any open PR

What would you PR?