In an interview on the Green Squares podcast, Erin Marsh, the sole maintainer of libcapstan, discussed the immense scale of her work and the impact of AI tooling. Libcapstan, a foundational protocol library, sees 80 million downloads a month with 40,000 packages depending on it.

Marsh detailed her unexpected path to maintainership, starting by reporting bugs and eventually inheriting the project. She shared her experiences with AI tools like Copilot, noting their limitations with older C codebases. While AI contributes a significant volume of pull requests (around 60 per week), Marsh stated only a few have been genuinely useful, with one exception identifying a decade-old race condition.

Security is a major concern, with Marsh receiving about ten reports monthly, most automated. She described attempts to use AI for exploit reproduction, which led to account bans. The challenges extend to vendor interactions, where vulnerabilities are sometimes disclosed with marketing agendas. Marsh also revealed she now maintains a portion of her own dependency tree due to upstream maintainers stepping down after she provided fixes.