I disagree with your premise that anyone seemingly competent can be trusted.
> It's very possible that the absolute amount of good software has increased, but it's become harder to find it.
It was like that long before AI. Most software written by humans is very bad, and it was accelerating before AI. And there was too much software to review everything long before AI as well.
If anything, I find that AI writes better code than the average human-written code. Of course it makes it harder to judge the contributor (before I could clearly see that they were not good coders, now I can't). But as a maintainer, I was reviewing the code before, and I am still reviewing it now. Some people will send unreadable AI-generated PRs that I won't review, some people will send readable PRs that I will review and merge without any consideration of provenance.
A problem could be that I may receive too many PRs to review (I think it happens to Linux). And the consequence of that may be that opening a PR to big open source projects may have to become less accessible eventually.
> It's very possible that the absolute amount of good software has increased, but it's become harder to find it.
It was like that long before AI. Most software written by humans is very bad, and it was accelerating before AI. And there was too much software to review everything long before AI as well.
If anything, I find that AI writes better code than the average human-written code. Of course it makes it harder to judge the contributor (before I could clearly see that they were not good coders, now I can't). But as a maintainer, I was reviewing the code before, and I am still reviewing it now. Some people will send unreadable AI-generated PRs that I won't review, some people will send readable PRs that I will review and merge without any consideration of provenance.
A problem could be that I may receive too many PRs to review (I think it happens to Linux). And the consequence of that may be that opening a PR to big open source projects may have to become less accessible eventually.
But that is orthogonal to the problem of trust.