I opened a PR on an open source project. It changed the way I think.

I just opened a pull request on the Rust-based Zed editor, a massive open source project with over 74k stars on GitHub. It changed the way I look at open source. I always imagined contributing to a large-scale open source project to be really intimidating. I thought that I was going to be asked all kinds of things I didn't understand, my code being roasted like crazy and maintainers flipping. I know this might sound a bit absurd, but this is actually how I thought, and that is what kept me from contributing to big projects for a while, and keeping it to smaller ones, until I changed my mind one day. One day, I thought: what is the worst that could happen? Like, really, the worst thing is that they say that my code "IS GARBAGE", so I said to myself: let's do this! I quickly cloned the repository of Zed and got off to a good start with my fellow friend Codex. One of the most important things when contributing to open source is, I think, an idea. You should never contribute because of your contribution graph, but because you want to change software for the better, and that is what I did. In Visual Studio Code, you have a button in your file view that allows you to collapse all subfolders, and I use it a lot, for when I am so deep into the code that I have literally every folder open. In Zed, you don't have a direct button for it, but you have to right-click the main folder and then click "Collapse All", and I say: room for improvement! As I consider myself a "Vibe coder" now, I booted up the Codex CLI and got to work. In a literal one-prompt this feature was added. I created a new branch, made the commit, opened a PR, and boom, there we go! I felt so excited! I did have to sign a digital contract real quick, did I read it? No. The builds ran, and finished successfully! When that was ready, I looked at my implementation, and thought: oh no. I forgot to include a small fact into the implementation. I rushed a new commit out the door, and saw that the builds weren't running again, because they needed moderator approval. At this moment, I am waiting for my PR to get merged and approved, and if it doesn't, I get it, I am just a random dude on the internet doing some stuff with some AI. But it's more about the lessons that I learned from this experience. Contributing doesn't have to be scary, and the open source community is nice and accessible. I'll post an update once my PR gets merged, and then: good night, fellow coders!