The problem is that FOSS projects that are popular already have a a high quality standard because they are developed by very smart people who’s been developing for a long time.
There is inherently a problem with current AI - It doesn’t learn.
When a new developer joins a FOSS project they first spend weeks or even months learning this project’s specific coding practices, standards, and reasoning. I’ve been programming for 20 years and have a PhD. I can’t “just start contributing” to something like KDE because I’ve never looked at its codebase. I don’t know assumptions, methodology, or challenges that are baked into the codebase. I need to spend time to learn those to be a useful contributor.
AI can’t learn unless you do gradient descend. The problem that you mention about sounding elitist is that those FOSS developers spend a good amount of their time training new contributors and everyone is proud of their work. Now you have people who are not ready to be contributors tell AI to contribute and it’s doing its best but it just can’t learn and even having a 200K token context is not enough to fit all those project specific assumptions and rhetorics in.
I have no ethical problem with that but I can’t speak for the masses. But also it’s a bit in a grey area legally since it’s unclear who owns LLM outputs.