Raft open-sourced its code but is not accepting pull requests, noting that AI coding agents have lowered the cost of writing code, though the expense of code review has not decreased.

Insight Beating AI Flash News: Agent collaboration platform Raft, founded by Richard Qian, former author of Kimi CLI, has released its source code, but is temporarily not accepting external Pull Requests and has not made its internal commit history public. The public GitHub repository is only a release mirror; actual development remains in a private repo, with a full code snapshot synced each version release. The Raft team argues that coding agents have made writing code far too cheap. Generating a seemingly reasonable patch is easy, even generating ten at once is not difficult, but maintainers still spend significant time understanding, verifying, and reviewing this code. In many cases, after reviewing code generated by others using agents, maintainers would rather have their own agents reimplement the code per requirements. Thus, the team aims to explore a "Prompt Request" model: contributors will not necessarily submit code directly, but first outline the problem to solve, its value, and constraints and tradeoffs, before maintainers and agents decide on implementation. This mechanism is not yet officially open; Raft’s GitHub Pull Requests and Issues are currently closed. Raft also challenges the value of traditional commit history. The team believes that with agents in development, rather than tracking every code change, "decision history"—including why changes were made, what approaches were tested, and issues identified by agents—may be more useful. Notably, Raft is source-available, not traditional open source. The FSL-1.1-ALv2 license permits users to view, run, and modify the code, but prohibits using it to offer competing commercial products or services. Each version will automatically convert to Apache 2.0 two years after release.