I remember back in 2020, people were complaining that we didn’t have enough documentation for creating GNOME Shell extensions. They said it was almost impossible to figure out where to start. They were right, learning all of it without proper documentation was a huge challenge for me too.

So, I decided to learn the GNOME Shell source code and shared what I learned in a YouTube tutorial series. I spent countless hours learning and making those videos, and the community was very happy to finally have guides and documentation.

On the GNOME side, Sriram Ramkrishna started the GNOME Extensions Rebooted project. When he noticed my tutorials, he invited me to join the team to help write documentation. I spent many hours learning GTK4 and the GNOME Shell 40 source code to write the famous GNOME Shell 40 Port Guide. I’d argue that many extension authors would have given up without it. Migrating from GTK3 to GTK4 and adapting to the changes between 3.38 and 40 was overwhelming. I wrote the guide with many examples, so developers could easily understand how to port their code.

Today we have all the documentation needed to start and maintain extensions, but nowadays, people are just simply vibe coding GNOME Shell extensions without reading any of it before submitting it to EGO. To be honest, in the age of LLMs, it feels like our documentation is feeding LLMs more than actual human developers.

For years, I tried my best to help the community, answering questions daily and reviewing extensions submitted to EGO, often spending 4 to 10 hours a day managing the whole extensions eco system. GNOME was incredibly generous this year and awarded me the GNOME Pants Award 2026 for my contributions to GNOME and the extensions ecosystem. That was a major personal milestone, and honestly, a testament to the growth of our community as a whole.

I’m writing this post because since early 2025, the volume of submissions has exploded. The vast majority are AI generated, and the huge workload is pushing me close to burnout. To be clear, all of my work is unpaid. While managing this volume easily matches a full-time job, my monthly donations remain close to zero. Given how many people use GNOME extensions daily, I truly believe our community can help make this workload doable. If you find value in what I do or if my work has helped you out over the years, please consider supporting me through donations. Without financial support, I simply won’t be able to keep going at this pace.

AI generated extensions, especially when prompted by non developers are frequently bloated and poorly designed. Because extensions run directly inside the GNOME Shell process, quality control is critical. Low-quality, AI generated code directly threatens the stability of the entire shell, and vibe coders need to realize that. As someone who reviews code across all of EGO, I can tell you that LLMs produce needlessly complex, hard to read code that takes significantly longer to review. To make matters worse, some submitters rely on AI to generate replies during the review process. I even received a response that accidentally pasted the LLM’s instructions intended for the user:

Then, respond to the specific points it points to and maintain a real public repository, with testing instructions and development history. This gives the base reviewer to evaluate maintenance and quality, without trying to hide anything.

On a positive note, a while back I published An Open Letter to AI for Generating GNOME Shell Extensions to fix specific code patterns their models were generating incorrectly and I noticed most of those issues disappear just a few weeks after that post, which is great news, but also proof of just how heavily our documentation is feeding these LLMs.

Anyway, we need viable solutions to keep the EGO ecosystem stable, trustworthy, and sustainable:

• I’m asking developers who understand GTK and GNOME Shell source code to join the review team. I am happy to mentor and teach you the review process. Please note that while this is a volunteer role, we need people who can be consistently available during the week.
• As many of you know, we introduced the Shexli linter a few months ago to make the review process easier. We need someone to help us improve it. The workflow is straightforward: reviewers identify false negatives and false positives during reviews, and you fix them in Shexli.

If you are interested in joining the review team or helping with Shexli, please reach out to us on GNOME Extensions Matrix channel. Thanks for being part of the GNOME community!