Devtools must be open source

Posted by bryanmikaelian 8 hours ago

Devtools must be open source(blog.exe.dev)

438 points | 157 commentspage 3

shevy-java 1 hour ago|

Microsoft, listen to this.

Bnjoroge 4 hours ago||

I like using exe but I’m not sure what to feel about this if exe itself isnt open source. Granted, their agent is OSS, but still feels somewhat ironic

arjie 5 hours ago||

Everything is now open-source by default. All features are replicable. I don’t really care that much any more that tools need to be OSS because I can make my copies when I want. And I do when I so desire.

Your feature page is your source code.

bluegatty 6 hours ago||

Good point, but extensibility != OSS though.

JetBrains and Claude/ChatGPT are not open source.

I think we would like them to be ... but ...

conqrr 5 hours ago||

Well we can go a step further and say Devtools must not be VC funded too :) Till date, the best and greatest dev tools I've used have not been influenced by VC decisions.

creakingstairs 5 hours ago||

I like the idea but I think manually editing source code is a bit too extreme. I’d rather have a plugin system or make the config scriptable.

2001zhaozhao 5 hours ago|

Agreed, i forked a devtool (vibe-kanban) months ago for my own use but keeping up with upstream was a significant burden even with LLMs. The benefit of a well designed plugin system in the devtool is not only to allow sharing of customizations, but also to make users' private customizations cheaper to maintain.

nextblock 7 hours ago||

Open-sourced doesnt have to be free either. There's always the very good GNU Affero General Public License 3 (AGPL-3) and others. I think most developers want open-source for transparency. We want to know what we are downloading.

ameliaquining 6 hours ago|

AGPL software is in practice always gratis, because anyone who has a copy can post it on the internet where anyone can download it. The monetization benefit of AGPL is that it makes it significantly more annoying (but by no means impossible) for IaaS providers to sell managed hosting for the software without making a separate commercial agreement with the copyright holder. This usually isn't relevant to dev tools that users run on their own machines.

writtenone 5 hours ago||

exe.dev is NOT open source. Funny

inigyou 4 hours ago||

Devtools for open source must be open source, but I see no reason to give any shits what corporations use.

And we live in capitalism, where making money is not optional.

pbjerkeseth 8 hours ago|

So, I'm a subscriber/user of exe.dev but even so I was a bit disappointed when the meat.dev tool linked in the article had no screenshots/meaningful docs. So I installed it and was bummed to see it only supported openAI and exe.dev llm integration by default. "You can just fork" - yeah I know, so take it with a grain of salt.

That aside aside, I agree. Since reading this article yesterday I've probably been overthinking an MIT from AGPL license switch for my own project Ouijit (shill time: https://ouijit.com). Its feels a little counterintuitive since AGPL encourages more open source downstream, but at the same time if I have solved some problem other agent harness devs are curious about, I just want them to take the solution without worrying about paying it back/forward.

crawshaw 7 hours ago|

(Author here.)

FWIW the first version of meat was based on anthropic models, I switched to Oai models because they are faster and just as good right now. This is an astonishing thing to say, but the switch was a single shot prompt using a frontier model. I’m happy to add some selector there, but that is also the point of this article: do you really need me to make it configurable when you can switch the tool over to Anthropic with a single prompt? It’s a strange new world we live in.

On the website: you’re right. I have some side-by-side diff examples I want to turn into a website. I am just short on hours in the day. My real goal is to make the tool compelling enough that I can convince my colleagues that we should build it into Shelley. :)

pbjerkeseth 7 hours ago||

Website not even needed! Janky terminal screenshot in the repo would have been good enough for me lol.

On another note, the reason I was perusing the blog was because I was curious about more of how exe handles review/quality/testing because you mentioned there being no code review in another post about stripe billings (maybe a different author). So consider this a casual request for more content on reducing delivery bottlenecks :)

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