I let the internet vote on what code gets merged weekly. Week 2: they voted to merge every day.

Source: Dev.to

Last Sunday, I merged the first community PR. This Sunday, the community voted to merge every day.

The Experiment

OpenChaos is a repo where anyone submits a PR, the community votes with GitHub reactions, and the most‑voted PR gets merged. Everything can be changed — including the rules.

The Numbers

Monday: The Invisible Ballot

GitHub’s API returns 30 results by default. We had 40+ open PRs.

Older PRs—including #13 (Rust rewrite) and #47 (IE6 mode)—weren’t showing on the leaderboard. People couldn’t vote on what they couldn’t see.

I merged the fix immediately.

Some will say I broke my own rules. But a bug that hides PRs isn’t chaos. It’s just broken. You can’t vote on whether to see the ballot. The voting booth has to work first.

The precedent: Content waits for Sunday. Infrastructure ships when it breaks.

Tuesday: The Rust Wars

Two PRs. Same meme. Very different execution.

• PR #13: “Rewrite it in rust” by @wvanlit was Week 1’s runner‑up with 458 upvotes. One problem: it didn’t build. Mid‑week it started passing CI, turning the meme into reality.

  The comments were split:

  • “less js ⇒ less bugs”
  • “Fewer people can read/write Rust. It’s going to make it harder to contribute for no real gain.”
  • “More screw‑ups = more chaos.”

  @bpottle investigated and wrote PR #91: “Rewrite it in Rust (for real)” (13 commits, Axum backend, proper async). It got 18 upvotes.

Lesson: Democracy doesn’t reward effort. It rewards memes.

Wednesday: The Quiet Coup

While everyone watched the Rust drama, PR #51: “Chaos each day” was climbing—a simple change to merge daily instead of weekly.

By Wednesday it passed the Rust rewrite. By Thursday it led by 300+ votes. By Sunday morning it had 788.

@matthewmayer called me the “benevolent dictator” and asked what time worked for me. I said 09:00 UTC — it gets me out of bed. @BetonZM updated the PR to 9:00.

The community votes on what. The maintainer sets when. Governance is emerging.

“let there be chaos. after this – vibe code merge every hour.”

Thursday: The Math

With #51 winning, the next week’s schedule looked like this:

Seven merges in seven days instead of seven weeks. By day nine, PR #63: “Add Automatic Merge” entered the queue, adding a GitHub Actions trigger—no human needed.

Sunday: The Second Merge

January 18, 2026 — 09:00 UTC

PR #51: “Chaos each day” merged with +788 votes.

The next merge happens tomorrow at 09:00 UTC. The Rust rewrite is next — if it can resolve its merge conflicts. Otherwise, 1999 comes early.

Final Standings

What’s Next

By next Sunday, OpenChaos could be:

• Written in Rust
• Styled like 1999
• Running without me

I have no idea what it becomes. That’s the whole point.

What’s Emerging

1. Velocity wins votes.
   The daily‑merge PR wasn’t clever or funny. It just promised more chaos, faster. That was enough.

2. The queue is the roadmap.
   With daily merges, you can see the next week of changes lined up. The suspense shifts from what wins to what survives.

3. Governance emerges from chaos.
   The first community merge added downvotes. The second changed the merge schedule. The community’s first instinct isn’t destruction—it’s building the system that controls the chaos.

They’re not breaking the game. They’re writing the rules.

Week 2 of ∞.
The next merge is tomorrow.

— Max (@skridlevsky)
openchaos.dev · GitHub