Posted by backlit4034 4 days ago
That is neither the incentive of AI companies nor the truth.
Availability of Open Source where stealing and illegal relicensing is not being litigated, is a perfect ecosystem for AI to work in.
Maintainer exhaustion is totally a secondary effect, not intended. The maintainer economy was already not working out, AI amplified the asymmetry at play.
They’re killing “programmer”, not “code”.
> I don't see how they wouldn't take out open source with it as a consequence
An analogy: the automobile industry sought to make working horses redundant, not to go door-to-door and kill horses. Horses getting chopped was an indirect economic consequence.
> If nobody even looks at code why would anyone bother to publish a library, much less care about making it maintainable?
For the exact same reasons as before. Agentic programming still integrates well with the existing ecosystem; I’ll tell agents which libraries to use, so I know what to expect.
While I don’t read the implementation of anything any more unless there’s a hard algorithmic problem, I do make an effort to read and document APIs thoroughly.
Interfacing is exactly the same, it’s just agents doing it.
> if everybody is vibe coding how long before your "average" dev has no idea what a library even is or why you'd want one?
That is a very good question.
While, simultaneously, an abundance of slop is being made.
There has been ever increasing consolidation in the hardware world along with an ever growing acceptance of restrictions by the public 'for our safety'.
Everything that everyone who believed in free software worked towards is being destroyed. There is no way to fight back unless we figure out how to fab computers in garages. It was all for nothing. The future is bleak.
Software that is not open source, is proprietary software. Open weight models, are not open source. Binary blobs in a repo with an Apache license, is not open source.
Am I a retro-grouch? Probably. I guess it doesn't matter anymore what I think about it.
Since when? Open source projects have for decades offered paid support. Projects like Red Hat, Snort, Security Onion and others. I don't know anyone that has ever thought this. It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise.
The copyright and IP maximalism approaches aren't important to me. The world where everyone can have software written easily is much more appealing. The user freedom is better met.
Eh yes and no. The problem is I am not somebody who is comfortable building their own software, so I depend on the generous communities that create free, open source software I can reliably run on my computer. There are lots of people like me! So the benefit isn’t being able to adjust the software to my liking, it’s the knowledge that I can’t have the rug pulled out from under me as easily since I know in theory I can run the software locally, but realistically (hopefully!) somebody else is going to fork and maintain it.
The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026.. incredibly sad.
Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.
The narrative is not friendly to communities of people owning complex software by sharing work now, but neither was it then. If you believe it was all wrong, an incorrect formulation, then disregard it and do not despair to move on. If you think ESR got something right that nobody can see anymore, then your hope should be rooted in the knowledge of how much less than what's possible we are currently achieving
Agreed. Linux and GNU did and still do so well because of the GPL. Red Hat built a billion dollar business on GPL software. Tons of Linux developers are payed great salaries by competing corporations that otherwise collaborate on Linux, because none of them are allowed by the GPL to make proprietary changes to the code
Either the LLM public capability is not sufficient to positively contribute, or it is.
If it is not sufficient to positively contribute, open source projects become drowned in low quality contributions.
If it is sufficient to positively contribute, we end up with multiple implementations of open source projects.
Actually maybe it only goes one way.
The commits are in my fork if anyone wants them but I can’t imagine why anyone would.
On the other hand a couple weeks ago I found an annoying bug in a coding agent project and had my agent fix it. It was a very small fix so I could tell it was correct with very little effort. I didn’t open a PR because that required a vouch, but I documented an issue (mostly on my own) and included the patch. I also referenced it in a downstream issue. Then I went to bed. The next morning, I saw a note from downstream thanking me - they’d updated to latest version and the issue was fixed.
The projects bot had reproduced the issue based on my description, tested the fix, validated it, and opened a PR. The maintainer merged it an hour later (it was two lines and obviously correct - easy call with the bots validation) and released it.
It felt like progress.
People are applying that label to anything that has the taint of AI on it. I get why.
I realize there are a lot of reasons why people hate AI, but one that is frequently cited is that it's dehumanizing. It's kind of ridiculous to see those same sort of people call something "slop" when I've put tens of hours into guiding the AI tooling. Talk about dehumanizing!
An OCD dream but you need to embrace it and configure it or you would get "AI slop".