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

Yes, please make me rebuild my software to change an API endpoint or port number. It's a wonderful use of time and electricity to build and spin up agents to fix the inevitable problems with building software. Instead of changing a string in configuration file.

(/s if not obvious).

Configuration and plugin systems exist for a good reason: software should be reconfigurable and modular without requiring the wholesale replacement of the original. Even if the code is open source, there are good reasons to move logic and data out of tree and into config or plugins.

Take his side project, Meat. I've been chewing on this problem for a while. It's a real problem right now: it sucks to read all this LLM-generated code. It's worthwhile to have an LLM summarize it for you.

The problem with that is this particular problem resists vibe coding. I've talked to a bunch of people who have tried to solve it on the side, and it's all sort of ... ok, but still unsolved.

- As mentioned, it takes a while to run. You can modify your other tools, as described, to smuggle the latency.

- LLMs don't know what you care about, so you have to maintain a list of things that you do care about, which is ever evolving. If you don't give it that, it produces slop.

- If you miss something, it hurts. Another layer of swiss-cheese AI doesn't feel right. If you trust the AI, just ask Claude to summarize its work!

- The summaries feel shareable, but the author of the PR is actually the most tolerate of slop about a PR. Your reviewers definitely don't want to read the output of a vibe-coded tool talking about 60% of your PR. They could ask their own Claude!

So, we're building a version (https://tern.sh), and it's not open source, because we want it to be shareable and hosted and support teams -- all that stuff that makes it work. At the end of the day, I'm not here to maintain my tools. I'm here to use my tools to do the job.

Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it. They actually make money from speaking fees.

"Open source" is now weaponized to price down entire companies to the floor and instead of humans maintaining the software, it is now coding agents doing the work.

Neither the free and open source software movement accounted for this disruption and they have become the new starving artists of the software world.

Emacs has been customizable probably longer than I've been alive. Apart from tinkering with Basic, Delphi and Visual C++ when I was a kid, the first things I made were Ruby scripts as personal tools for various things. Had a personalized Emacs environment 20 years ago. Iterated on some abandoned open source projects. And so on...

I guess congrats on an AI telling you about things that have pretty much always existed.