The OnlyDust chapter closes here.Thank you for an incredible ride.

When we started OnlyDust, open source funding felt urgent. Maintainers were burning out. Critical infrastructure depended on volunteers.

For the last 4 years, we distributed $18M in grants to 4,000 contributors — first through committees, then through an agent allocating $1M monthly.

Then maintainers started rejecting our money. They stopped accepting external contributions entirely.

Why?

Low-skill contributors were flooding them with AI-generated code. Maintainers couldn't tell if they were talking to humans or bots. Nobody enjoyed the collaboration anymore.

Working alone was faster. Less coordination overhead.

Collaboration was already fragile. AI made it worse — not because the technology failed, but because people used it improperly. Output scaled 10x. Quality didn't, and neither did security.

The risk became existential. One bad AI-generated commit could compromise critical infrastructure. Maintainers saw it and stepped back.

The bottleneck moved. It's no longer funding. It's security. It's knowing whether code is safe to merge.

That's the problem now. And it's only getting worse.

That's why we launched ctrlg.com.

— Greg & Paco