Interview with a Maintainer
4 hours ago
- Erin Marsh is the sole maintainer of libcapstan, a foundational protocol library with 80 million monthly downloads and 40,000 depending packages.
- The project received agent contributions (60 pull requests/week), but most are unwanted; only 3 were useful in a year.
- AI tools like Copilot caused issues (e.g., reformatting code incorrectly) and verification agents were banned for resembling exploits.
- Security vulnerability disclosures can be exploitative, with vendors publicizing issues before patches are ready and selling hardened versions.
- Erin inherited maintenance of dependencies, including one that led to a monetary offer to re-add a removed library.
- Funding challenges include grant denials due to lack of standards group participation (platform incompatible with Firefox) and unhelpful blockchain-based initiatives.
- A Rust rewrite (capstan-rs) gained stars but skipped core features like resume, and its maintainer was hired elsewhere.
- An OpenClaw fork of the protocol replicated a known bug and has a backlog of issues from agents.
- Erin plans to join a co-maintainer's goat farm, expecting libcapstan to remain foundational and hard to replace.