The Archestra team faced overwhelming AI bot spam that poisoned their GitHub discussions. A single issue attracted 253 comments, mostly from AI bots flooding the conversation with pointless implementation plans. The team spent significant time cleaning up untested pull requests and hallucinated issues, driving away legitimate contributors like @ethanwater and @developerfred who were working on bounties.

They implemented a contributor whitelist system requiring onboarding through their website with ethical AI rules and CAPTCHA verification. The technical solution leverages GitHub's "Limit to prior contributors" setting and Git's --author flag to create commits attributed to external users. By committing with the external user's GitHub noreply email, the system automatically grants them contributor status and access to the repository.

While GitHub celebrates massive metric growth partly driven by AI-generated content, open source projects like Archestra bear the burden of cleaning up the resulting "slop." The team values quality over quantity, implementing these measures despite sensitivity as a VC-backed startup measured by GitHub activity. The five-step onboarding process represents a nuclear option to maintain a legitimate contributor community.