I have 50+ public repositories on GitHub. Some of them haven’t been touched in years. A few still get stars and forks weekly. Most sit somewhere in between — not abandoned, not active, just… there.

Until recently, that “just there” state came with guilt. Every Dependabot PR I didn’t merge, every issue I didn’t respond to, every README that still referenced a deprecated API — it all felt like debt accumulating. Maintaining open-source repositories was a second job I never signed up for.

In August 2024, I pushed a commit to syno — my Synology DSM API wrapper with 320 stars — that just said “Maintainers wanted.” I’d given up.

That changed last weekend.

The old maintenance tax

Here’s what had accumulated across these three repos while I was busy building Rootly :

• 24 Dependabot PRs on syno alone. Security patches for minimist, lodash, ini, elliptic, shell-quote, qs — some dating back to 2020. Half of them sat unmerged because the project had no CI, so I’d have to clone it, run tests locally, hope nothing broke, and merge manually. Most just rotted.
• “Is this repository still maintained?” — an issue opened on both syno (Feb 2023) and pgbouncerhero (Feb 2023). The honest answer was: barely. The diplomatic answer was silence.
• Issues open for years with no response. On syno: “Are there any plans to officially support DSM 7.x.x?” (Oct 2022), “Consider replacing deprecated npm package request” (Oct 2022), “Photo Station API?” (Apr 2019), “Skip authentication if not needed” (Jan 2018). Eight years of feature requests I never got to.
• Deprecated everything. syno used CoffeeScript, the request package (deprecated since 2020), new Function() hacks, and __proto__ mutation. aws-launcher’s fileicon dependency had been broken since macOS Monterey removed Python 2 — in 2022. pgbouncerhero depended on Sprockets, jQuery, and Semantic UI.
• Zero CI across all three repos. No tests, no linting, no automated builds. Every merge was a leap of faith.
• A URI::InvalidURIError bug on pgbouncerhero reported in September 2023 — a crash when the database URL was nil or empty. Straightforward fix. Still open 2.5 years later.

Each of these tasks is small. None of them are hard. But they’re endless, and they compound. For a solo maintainer with a day job and a startup to run, it’s death by a thousand paper cuts. So you push a commit that says “Maintainers wanted” and move on.

What I actually did last week

Between February 20 and 21, I sat down with Claude Code (powered by Claude Opus 4.6 ) and modernized three repositories that had been collecting dust for years. Here’s what happened.

syno — dormant 3 years, revived in an evening

My Synology DSM REST API wrapper. Created in 2014. 320 stars. The last real code change was February 2023. The kind of codebase where you’d open it, look at it, and close the tab.

PR #78 : v3.0.0 — Full TypeScript rewrite. First commit at 6:24pm, merged the next afternoon at 2:49pm.

What it covered:

• Complete rewrite from CoffeeScript to strict TypeScript with ESM + CJS dual output
• Replaced request with native fetch (Node 24+), callbacks with async/await
• Proxy-based dynamic methods replacing new Function() + __proto__ mutation
• Extracted 778 real DSM 7.x API definitions from encrypted SPK packages
• Added Synology Photos support (SYNO.Foto.* / SYNO.FotoTeam.*)
• Two-factor auth (OTP), session reuse, binary response handling
• Automated SPK fetcher with XChaCha20-Poly1305 decryption
• CLI rewrite with Commander v12
• CI workflow, Dependabot, 89 tests
• Runtime deps cut from 9 to 3
• Fixed 4 bugs, closed 10 issues

The numbers: +51,345 lines, -92,105 lines, 5,583 files changed. The bulk of the coding happened in a single evening session — I reviewed and merged the next afternoon.

aws-launcher — dormant 8.5 years, revived in 1.5 hours

A macOS dock launcher for AWS services. Created in 2017. 133 stars. Last commit: October 2017. It was stuck at 71 AWS services (2017 service list), used CommonJS callbacks, and fileicon 0.2.0 had been broken since macOS Monterey removed Python 2.

PR #6 : v2.0.0 — Modernize to ESM, update icons, add CI/CD. First commit at 12:43am, merged at 2:27pm the same day.

What it covered:

• Rewrote from CommonJS callbacks to ESM with async/await
• Expanded from 71 to 206 AWS console shortcuts
• Replaced all 71 old PNGs with 305 official AWS Architecture Icons (July 2025 pack)
• Added services.json manifest — adding services is now a data-only change
• Added --dry-run flag, ESLint 10, Vitest (13 tests), GitHub Actions CI
• Fixed fileicon for macOS 12.3+

The numbers: +3,768 lines, -101 lines, 359 files changed.

pgbouncerhero — dormant 3 years, revived in 1.5 hours

A dashboard for PgBouncer. Created in 2017. 280 stars. I wrote about it in my last blog post before the 9-year silence. Last meaningful code change was 2019 (v1.0.3), with a version bump in 2023.

PR #14 : v3.0.0 — Modernize frontend stack and add test infrastructure. First commit at 10:01am, merged at 11:38am. Yes — 97 minutes.

What it covered:

• Replaced entire frontend: Sprockets → Propshaft, jQuery → Turbo + Stimulus (Hotwire), Semantic UI → Tailwind CSS 4
• Required Ruby >= 3.2 and Rails >= 7.2
• 20 minitest tests, Appraisal (Rails 7.2/8.0/8.1), GitHub Actions CI matrix (Ruby 3.2–4.0 × Rails 7.2–8.1)
• RuboCop, Herb ERB linting
• Renamed master/slave → primary/replica
• Fixed rescue Exception → rescue StandardError, YAML.load → YAML.safe_load

The numbers: +1,322 lines, -478 lines, 67 files changed.

Let that sink in

Three repositories. Combined ~5 hours of active coding. All three went from “abandoned” to modern, tested, CI-enabled, and published to their respective registries.

Without AI, each of these would have been a multi-week project. The syno rewrite alone — CoffeeScript to TypeScript, extracting API definitions from encrypted SPK packages, building a new CLI — that’s a month of evenings at minimum. Realistically, I’d never have done it. The “Maintainers wanted” commit was the proof.

The mindset shift

The real change isn’t the tooling — it’s the relationship with your repositories.

Before, I’d see a notification from an old repo and feel dread. Another thing to deal with. Another context switch from the work that actually matters. So I’d ignore it, and the guilt would compound.

Now, maintenance is something I can batch. I can sit down with a coffee, open Claude Code, and say “let’s go through my repos.” It’s almost enjoyable — like cleaning your apartment with someone who actually likes organizing.

The key insight: AI doesn’t just make maintenance faster, it makes it interruptible. You can do 20 minutes of maintenance on a repo, stop, come back next week, and pick up where you left off. There’s no context-loading penalty because the AI loads the context for you.

What works well

Full rewrites are the surprise win. I wouldn’t have attempted a CoffeeScript-to-TypeScript rewrite manually. Too tedious, too many files, too much risk of breaking things. But with Claude Opus 4.6, I described the target architecture, and we worked through it systematically. The AI handled the mechanical translation while I made the design decisions.

Dependency updates are the obvious quick win. After each modernization PR, Dependabot immediately kicked in with follow-up PRs — and merging those was trivial because the repos now had CI and tests.

CI/CD from scratch is nearly turnkey. Every one of these repos went from zero CI to full GitHub Actions workflows — lint, typecheck, test, build — in the same session.

Documentation rewrites are surprisingly good. Point the AI at your codebase and your README, and it’ll find every discrepancy. It knows what your code actually does vs. what your docs say it does.

What still needs you

AI doesn’t replace maintainer judgment. It replaces maintainer time.

But there’s something I didn’t expect: Claude Code’s Plan Mode made the judgment part better too.

Before each of these rewrites, I started a Plan Mode session. Instead of jumping straight into code, Claude explored the codebase, identified the pain points, and proposed an architecture. For syno, it laid out the full migration path — CoffeeScript → TypeScript, request → native fetch, callbacks → async/await, new Function() → Proxy-based dynamic methods — and I could approve, adjust, or reject each decision before a single line was written.

That’s the part I want to emphasize: I wasn’t just rubber-stamping AI output. Plan Mode turned the modernization into a conversation about architecture. “Should we keep CJS support or go ESM-only?” Both. “Node 22 or 24?” 24 — let’s use native fetch. “Keep the callback API for backwards compat?” No, clean break, v3.0.0.

The decisions were mine. The exploration, analysis, and execution were Claude’s.

You still need to decide:

• What’s the target architecture? I chose TypeScript for syno, ESM for aws-launcher, Hotwire for pgbouncerhero. Plan Mode helped me evaluate the trade-offs, but those were taste and strategy calls.
• Should this feature be added? AI can implement anything you ask for. That doesn’t mean your library should do everything. Saying no is still a human job.
• When to archive vs. maintain? Some repositories should be archived. That’s a decision about your priorities and energy, not a code change.
• Community tone: How you respond to contributors, what behavior you tolerate in issues, whether you accept that PR from someone’s first open-source contribution even though it needs work — that’s leadership, not labor.

The labor is what AI handles. The leadership is still yours. Plan Mode just makes the leadership more informed.

The bigger picture

Open source has a maintenance crisis. We all know it. Projects that millions of people depend on are maintained by one person in their spare time. The xkcd comic about the Nebraska guy isn’t funny — it’s a documentary.

AI won’t solve the social and economic problems of open-source sustainability. Maintainers still burn out. Funding is still broken. But if AI can reduce the toil — the mechanical, repetitive, soul-crushing parts of maintenance — then maybe more maintainers stick around longer. Maybe the “Maintainers wanted” commit becomes “Maintainers empowered.”

The barrier to maintaining a repository used to be time. Now the barrier is just caring enough to start a conversation.

I went from “Maintainers wanted” to shipping three major versions in a weekend. That’s not a productivity hack. That’s a fundamentally different relationship with your own code.

Written with Claude Opus 4.6 via Claude Code .