I just got my first AI-assisted pull request accepted and merged. I must say, I am quite pleased — and a bit humbled: the AI wrote the code, I did the dull part: project manager.

The project is Openfox, a smart local-LLM-first agentic coding assistant. I found a bug: it did not see projects that are symlinks to directories. I keep my git repos in various places, and symlink them into the folder Openfox scans — but Dirent.isDirectory() just tested if a file was a directory, so it failed to detect that a symlink could be a link to an actual directory. Thus symlinked project folders were invisible in the directory browser, the workspace listing, the orphaned-workspace scan, and the plugin listing.

Following my own prompt request idea, I asked Openfox itself — running DeepSeek V4 Flash — to analyze and fix the bug on a local copy. It found the root cause, proposed a shared isDirectoryEntry helper that follows symlinks via stat() (excluding broken and cyclic links), and even produced a careful analysis of Windows junction points. I opened the issue and offered the prompt to the maintainer.

Then I decided on my own to submit a real pull request anyway. My prompt-request post concedes there are cases where a PR is still better — this was one: the fix was small and well-contained, tests existed, and I had a full suite to prove it. Leaving all that on the maintainer would have been rude.

So PR #245 it was: the isDirectoryEntry helper used at all four call sites, with 43 new tests covering symlinked workspaces and the directories API — broken symlinks excluded, and a Windows skip where needed. The full unit suite passed (over 4000 tests), static checks were clean, and I rebased onto develop three times as the upstream moved. Merged as 37e78208, ships in v2.0.125.

Which prompted me to think: the AI used an AI tool - openfox — co-made by AI to generate the code, I did the specs, the validation of the diagnostics, the tests, the rebases, the cross-platform care — and the judgment call to ship a proper PR with full coverage instead of prompt slop. I acted as an auditor, the role that Cringely is saying is our added value for us humans.