First PR to an open source project, you’re proving you can read. That you studied the codebase, matched the style, understood why things are the way they are before suggesting they should be different. Most people skip this. Most PRs show it.
The second and third, you’re proving you’ll stay. Maintainers have seen hundreds of drive-by contributions. One PR, gone forever. The ones who come back are rare enough to notice.
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth, the tone shifts. Review comments get shorter. Approval comes faster. Not because the bar dropped, because you already cleared it three PRs ago and they know it.
Then there’s a moment when the conversation changes direction entirely. They stop reviewing your ideas and start sharing theirs. Half-formed feature thoughts, architecture questions, “what do you think about this approach.” That’s not a code review. That’s a peer conversation. You didn’t apply for it. You just showed up enough times with work good enough that it happened.
I’ve been on both sides of this. As the maintainer watching someone earn it, and as the contributor earning it. The pattern is the same from both angles. Trust isn’t given or taken, it’s accumulated. Commit by commit, review by review, until one day the relationship is just different and neither side can point to when it changed.
In open source, the code is the easy part. The hard part is staying long enough for the invitation.