My First Open Source Contribution

How a tiny bot that monitors OpenAI API spec changes led to my first open source contribution.

Michael Cummings

March 5, 2026 · 2 min read

My old desk setup in my apartment in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago.

Today I made my first contribution to a major open source project!

This wasn't my first attempt at contributing to vercel/ai, but it was my first successful one.

The last time I tried to contribute, someone beat me to it by mere minutes.

I realized that in order to contribute, I had to be fast. So I built a bot to monitor the OpenAI API spec repository for changes and alert me when something changed.

michaelcummings12openai-api-spec-monitor

The bot watches the OpenAI API spec repository and notifies my Discord whenever something changes.

It works by:

Fetching the latest OpenAI API spec
Using native git diff to compare against the previous version
Generating a summary of changes using AI
Sends an alert in my Discord server

Pretty simple, but extremely useful.

Catching a Model Update

A few months after launching it, the bot detected a major change.

OpenAI had updated the GPT model version from 5.2 to 5.4 in the spec.

I got the alert and quickly pulled up the vercel/ai repo. No open PRs, so far so good.

Rapdily, I pulled up Antigravity and instructed Gemini to update the model definitions in the package.

At the same time, I tasked my Clawdbot with crawling the vercel/ai GitHub page to figure out what I had to name my branch, PR, and what description to add.

Everything started coming together all at once. I quickly reviewed Gemini's work and created a branch based on what Openclawd found.

I flipped back to GitHub and checked the pull requests page. I breathed a sigh of relief, no one else had opened a PR. I quickly opened one, and then of course had to do my own code review.

As expected, there were several things I noticed that AI did that I didn't like. I made some tweaks, pushed a few more commits, and marked the PR as ready for review.

Within a few minutes, I received a review from one of the maintainers from Vercel. They had a few suggestions. I made the changes and pushed a few more commits.

About 20 minutes after I opened the pull request, it was merged!

First PR, But Many More to Come

This was a small change, but contributing to open source projects that I actually use feels great.

I'm looking forward to making more contributions in the future 🚀

open sourcevercelaiopenaitypescript

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Michael Cummings

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michaelcummings12openai-api-spec-monitor

Catching a Model Update

First PR, But Many More to Come

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