AI Culture in Open Source — The Sylius Way

AI is reshaping how open-source teams work — but the real challenge isn’t technical, it’s cultural.
At Sylius, we’ve spent the past year finding the sweet spot where AI genuinely helps the whole community: from streamlining plugin updates and code reviews to keeping our ecosystem aligned with Symfony’s evolution.

This talk shares our journey of building an AI-friendly culture — one that values experimentation, context, and shared learning over automation for its own sake.
You’ll hear lessons learned from real use cases inside the Sylius project and walk away with ideas on how to introduce AI practices that benefit not just your team, but your entire community.

Transcript

1. AI Culture in Open Source
 The Sylius Way sylius.com Magdalena Sadowska Head of Product Operations 
 at Sylius 1
2. sylius.com 2 Keep your hand up as long as it's true Who here uses AI
 in their dev workflow? ✋ Raise your hand if you've used AI at all in the last week ✋ Keep it up if you've used AI for code review ✋ Keep it up if you trust it more than a junior colleague's review
3. sylius.com 3 Keep your hand up as long as it's true Who here uses AI
 in their dev workflow? ✋ Raise your hand if you've used AI at all in the last week ✋ Keep it up if you've used AI for code review ✋ Keep it up if you trust it more than a junior colleague's review
4. sylius.com 4 Keep your hand up as long as it's true Who here uses AI
 in their dev workflow? ✋ Raise your hand if you've used AI at all in the last week ✋ Keep it up if you've used AI for code review ✋ Keep it up if you trust it more than a junior colleague's review
5. sylius.com 5 Adoption is up. 
 Trust is down. of developers use AI ↑84% up from 76% don't trust the output ↑46% up from 31% ref.: Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey
6. sylius.com 6 We think AI makes us faster. 
 It actually made us slower. what developers think +20% faster what actually happened -19% slower ref.: METR's Randomized Controlled Trial on Developer Productivity, 2025
7. sylius.com 7 AI agents didn't knock.
 They just walked in. SEPTEMBER 2025 4M AI-generated PRs / month MARCH 2026 17M AI-generated PRs / month 4x in 6 months GitHub: 5 outages in the first two days of April 2026 from AI traffic load Claude Code alone 2.6M weekly commits — up 25× from 100K in September 2025 ref.: danilchenko.dev · GitHub Engineering Blog · April 2026
8. sylius.com 8 What happens when AI writes faster than humans can review? Review takes too long Teams skip review Bugs 
 multiply Production explodes 441% Review Time 31% No review +54% Bugs/Dev +242.7% Incidents/PR ref.: Faros AI Engineering Intelligence, 22,000 developers telemetry, 2026
9. sylius.com 9 AI doesn't fix a team. 
 It amplifies what's already there. Symfony gave you the first two.
 This talk is about the third. 1. conventions 2. workflows 3. room to experiment ref.: DORA 2025 — State of AI-Assisted Software Development (Google, ~5,000 professionals)
10. sylius.com 10 Open Source: 2026 Q1 Straight Outta Control Jan 2026 cURL shuts down bug bounty "AI slop hampers 
 our will to live" Feb 2026 GitHub adds "disable PRs" button The feature nobody should have needed Dec 2025 CodeRabbit study AI PRs have 1.7x more bugs Apr 2026 Linux draws the line 
 Disclose the model. 
 Own the code. Feb 2026 OpenClaw agent vs matplotlib Rejected PR → AI publishes attack on maintainer
11. sylius.com The Sylius Way ulue s Tls se 11
12. sylius.com 12 500+ plugins, 2k+ live projects 
 in the ecosystem

 We changed everything underneath those plugins and projects.
 Our code moved forward. 
 Our community needed a bridge. Sylius 1.x Sylius 2.x API Platform 4 New frontend Twig Hooks Bootstrap
13. sylius.com 13 We built the bridges. 📖 Plugins Migration Guide (with docs MCP) 🤖 Sylius AI Contexts (public repo) 1.x
14. sylius.com 14 Self-review, upgraded Before: 
 you review your own code before opening a PR Now: 
 Claude reviews code you wrote together — locally, before anyone sees it
15. sylius.com 15 Understanding contributions at scale 10 devs. 50+ public repositories to monitor. Community PRs from all over the world. Claude helps us understand quicker what 
 a large contribution actually does.
16. sylius.com 16 CodeRabbit: early bet, time to move on Enabled before Codex Review 
 and Copilot Review existed. PR summaries — great. Code review — not adopted. The landscape moved. Time to move with it. R E
17. sylius.com 17 ymfonyie aris ees ao The model is only half the solution. The other 
 half is the harness. Fabien Potencier
18. sylius.com 18 ugust First open-source eCommerce with MCP We shipped it early. Then we waited. 3 quarters later - the ecosystem looks like it’s being slowly adopted.
19. docs.sylius.com 19 If your project is on 
 GitBook — you already 
 have this too. Plug your AI agent into Sylius docs. One command Live, up-to-date no cached training data
20. sylius.com 20 AI doesn't eliminate burnout.
 It transforms it. ↑ ↑ 42% rise in "digital exhaustion" AI slop hampers our will to live. Daniel Stenberg, cURL maintainer Mental load has overtaken workload as the #1 cause of burnout AI users work during breaks, at night, early morning - fewer pauses in the day ↑ ref.: HBR 2026 · Deloitte 2025 · Microsoft 2025
21. sylius.com Walk while agents run🚶🏼 21
22. sylius.com 22 A blueprint 
 for AI culture in your project 🤙🏻 Sylius team @ Symfony Slack 01. 02. 03. 04. 05. 06. Culture first, tools second Encode your knowledge as AI context Layer your reviews: AI first, human last Be honest about what doesn't work Make your project AI-accessible Protect your people Try one. Tell us how it went.
23. sylius.com 23 ex-coder Maggie Head of Product Operations 11 years at Sylius… basically a walking company black box 😄 My superpower: getting things done ADHD diagnosed → explains a lot 🧠 I connect Product, Engineering, Marketing & Sales so things actually move Mom of two kindergartners; 
 fan of ✈️, F1 🏎️, art & board games
24. Sylius sylius.com/slack addons.sylius.com docs.sylius.com ps-summit.com