I believe with a good CI suite in place and a good template for issues (eg. current behavior, expected behavior...) we could use a local LLM like DeepSeek-Coder to solve the easiest issues and simply review the changes. This would aid development greatly because it would allow to focus only on the most difficult issues and less on actual mantainance.
Look at this repo: https://github.com/princeton-nlp/SWE-agent?tab=readme-ov-file