AI is causing everything to change, small basically trivial oss projects are no longer really needed - that doesn’t seem too bad, we can focus on the more exciting things now!
I’ve often wondered the opposite. The number of pieces of software I used to pay for that I was able to replace with software I’ve built using agents is nearing double digits.
As a developer (it sounds like), you were probably never even a drop in the bucket dumped into the ocean of the proprietary software market. Most people don’t want to change their own oil.
Not only you're making huge assumptions on AI's ability to build software useable by non-software engineers without professional input, you're also underestimating people's desire to pay just for convenience ("gee, I need a diet tracker, let me find a few people to help me vibe code it instead of paying $10")
It's a valid assumption, and it is going to have a huge impact on the SaaS marketplace.
"I need a resource tracking application. Let me find a consultant to help me vibe code it rather than pay $10,000 a month."
I have paid a relatively big price for a software which does a simple thing: Drawing diagrams. The application? It's called OmniGraffle pro. That simple looking program drawing diagrams can do flowcharts to scaled architectural or industrial diagrams and everything in between.
Try replicating it with a couple of agents. Not the capabilities, but the performance, stability and dependability and sustainability as well.
Same is true for my favorite text editor on macOS, BBEdit, or IDE of choice, Eclipse. I can increase the number of examples.
These tools are valuable not because they are expensive. They are valuable, or indeed priceless, because of the polish they have. The small features make no sense for a beginner or how they cope when things get absurdly haywire.
Immediate features make us excited and they are easier to replicate because they are visible, but things like performance, dependability, error recovery or the small tweaks they have gone through in the last decade are not, and this is what matters.
We're exploring computing via AI again, and we act that we did nothing in the last 60 years or so. Software and computing is much deeper than it looks at the surface, and we'll learn this in a very very painful way, again.
Can that software work on other machines that aren’t configured the exact way yours is? Will they survive the next OS update? How about 3?
I’ve seen this claim so many times but I struggle to believe people are running vibe coded software replacements as daily drivers. Certainly not in a professional environment. They are all invariably interesting little projects at best.
As I've been vibe coding a side project, I've been curious on just how much cruft and slop the agents are training on now. A part of me feels like I should actually have it be in a private repo.
I've noticed that for smaller projects (<=10k lines of code) the valuable thing is no longer source or binary artifacts, it's the encoded ideas, architecture and domain knowledge. A folder of plan files is about as valuable as the code itself, and easier to adapt to new domains
I wonder if that will spawn a new type of open source project. Where we have free exchange of ideas, without necessarily requiring the free exchange of code (which would violate a lot of Stallmann's ideas about open source, but might ironically be attractive to people who dislike AI training on their code)
For one off tools, sure. For ongoing tools, either they are right after the first implementation and you use them for years. Alternatively, you need to maintain them and they decay until you discard them.
You also need to be ok with your tool to do task A (you had an agent build) to work different from my tool to do task A (I had an agent build). Meaning we can’t reliably compare the output from those tools.
The ecosystem of open-source reusable components will remain a good idea as long as architectural principles like low coupling and high cohesion still apply—otherwise it’s wasting resources on reinventing wheels.
A lot of us out there don't make Open Source for rewards. We just like sharing things. I have about 10 users for one of my projects. If I had 10,000 it would be the same. I'm just glad anybody found it useful. And I like using other projects because at the end of the day I don't want to sit here writing code (even AI code), I just want a solution to my problem.
Maybe there will be fewer Open Source contributors. But maybe there will be even more of them with AI making the labor and maintenance easier. Either way I will still be publishing my dinky project, because it works for me, so maybe it'll work for someone else.
Free and open source software communities were not always friendly, even at their peak... And now there are far too many projects that are outright hostile towards anyone who uses AI for any purpose. Very discouraging.
I understand the hostility against AI itself, but people are reacting with prejudice against AI users. People are building blacklists of "AI boosters" and their "tainted" projects. This is not fine.
It seems to me that when you choose to outsource your thinking to a machine, you cease to be a user and turn into a bit of a dreamer. The implication over time is that your cognitive skills will significantly deteriorate because you’ve decided to outsource your thinking. This is also not fine.
I don’t like the whole “lists” thing, that sounds like literal insanity. But I feel like I can understand the reasoning behind it, even if I think it’s a step too far. “No AI contributions” is easily enough IMO. But then all this is just IMO :)
Yeah I agree. I can understand the reasons behind it, I just feel like there should be more nuance. Some people on lobsters called my hand written projects slop because I allowed AI to touch them and told me to get out repeatedly, and it only spiraled from there.
> your cognitive skills will significantly deteriorate
This is a fair concern. I for one am trying my best to distill the AI's weights into my own brain. My human limitations make this process slow, but I am trying.
At the same time, I'm also vibecoding things I don't fully understand, simply because it'd be foolish to not spend the tokens I paid money for.
It seems like the opportunity is for open source to explode thanks to AI. This week I replaced my home security camera system with open source Frigate, because I was able to use AI to take the source code, replace the object detection models that were included with the code with something that was a better fit for my machine, customize how the videos were stored and under what circumstances. There's a lot more that I can do with it that I haven't yet as well.
I couldn't do that with the proprietary system.
It seems like we'll see a lot more customized open source options or rapidly accelerated open source projects thanks to this type of thing. I'm really curious to see if something like LibreOffice stops playing catchup with Microsoft and actually passes it.
If the improvement rate of Omarchy for Linux desktop experience can be a barometer for anything, I'm extremely optimistic.
The #1 barrier for me to do 90% of the things that I've done for myself over the last 3 months for the prior 10-15 years has been time. I'm more than capable of downloading Frigate and figuring out how to customize everything, modify and compile the code to do what I want, but it would have taken me hours to days to do it. Now I can setup a couple of stacked /goal prompts overnight and get there. It's fantastic.
> This week I replaced my home security camera system with open source Frigate, because I was able to use AI to take the source code, replace the object detection models that were included with the code with something that was a better fit for my machine, customize how the videos were stored and under what circumstances. There's a lot more that I can do with it that I haven't yet as well.
>
> I couldn't do that with the proprietary system.
You also didn't give anything to opensource. This shows that AI can allow open source to be used in more cases and in more flexible ways, but in no way does this mean that open source (and especially the good high quality one) will explode.
If anything we saw an explosion of open source projects, most of them low quality slop, and even the ones that used to be high quality are slowly degrading.
Consider this perspective from a radical humanist populist framework:
Open source is a side effect of an industry so extractive that it can dedicate some of its most talented workers to volunteer in non-competitive ventures. Open source culture is a tacit acknowledgement of a privileged social class that needs not lower itself to brutish competition for its dues, this class instead enjoys the patronage of wealthy benefactors, reminiscent of the enlightenment system of arts which was enabled by the pillaging of a continent. For all the treasures of Europe, hundreds of years later a hole of human deprivation remains bored through the heart of South America. The extremes of noble beneficence and savage exploitation are often found happy bed partners, once the covers are removed.
AI is a reversal of those fortunes, it's democratization of compute. Now anyone literate can write instructions for a computer to do useful work. Certain US labs limiting foreign AI access wasn't a pause to build sufficient security tools to prevent proliferation of powerful op sec weapons (widely reported in government, industry and media), it was about throttling capabilities in poor countries where such software promises the biggest threat to western tech. It's the same reason the giants now murmer about slowing the frontier, they realize they've passed the optimum, any advancement now works against their power and advantage. The problem is, they're spurred forward by naive eastern labs that have never enjoyed the same global dominance. The giants realize the technology is so revolutionary that it could literally devours its masters, but they've made a Faustian bargain and can't help but play to the end.
The open source "gift economy" is a patronage system akin to the Renaissance arts, enabled by maximal extractive leverage. AI represents a democratization of the human machine interface
That's valid. I didn't contribute anything back yet but I certainly could at the point that I'm convinced the refinements are polished enough.
At the same time, how different is that from much of open source today. Usage is dramatically higher than contributions. How many open source packages are included in every software project we build with. How many of those are any of us contributing back to?
The prevailing moral panic prevents anyone in the space from sharing in communities where open source is generally discussed. People flag and openly disparage (against community guidelines) and have histrionic reactions.
We'll just have to wait until the topic cools off before we can see how llm usage impacts open source.
100% the smoking gun. It's not the thought that counts, it's the typing you save. You don`t need to read the text, it's not enough. You need to digest the slop.
I generally don’t bother to complain about claudism but YES. There’s a special irony to using a tool to complain about how the tool is breaking things.
Nothing has been replaced. This is just propaganda by a consultant who explicitly is for hire for AI integrations. He has probably never done anything in open source.
He uses open source and sells it out for cheap marketing. Clients take note.
I think there will be a difference between foundational software and application software. The more you go to the outer layer the more code will be generated on the spot, throw-away, single usage. On the other extreme, foundational software that is battle tested, security hardened, has survived waves of AI-hacking, will become irreplaceable and crystallise as a semi-immutable layer. Open source is in the best position to win foundational software while agents will dominate the outer layer of disposable code.
Why is this on the frontpage again? It's slop writing with a blatantly untrue borderline ragebait premise. Can we please stop this madness? Hacker News doesn't have a downvote feature (for stories), and that absolutely does have its pros and cons, but this needs to stop. This is basically SPAM.
This is the biggest opportunity in open source I've seen in my lifetime. I bet you in three years we'll have more and better open source libraries than ever before.
For example, a few months ago I was looking to build a license detection tool, and within a few weeks with the help of Claude built a tool that was 20x better than the best open source one I found (I also open sourced mine as well: https://github.com/licensedetector/cli).
The biggest problem will be navigating through the glut of libraries that have been written in my mind -- 100 tools for the same use case, all with < 100 stars will make it hard to decide between. Also, if the user didn't write them thinking about anything other than their own use cases when releasing their library, the standard response will probably be for the agent or programmer to recreate the wheel yet again, only for their specific use case, making it now 101 tools for the same use case.
I'm also trying to build as much as I can in open source, and I feel productive. But, as I mentioned in the article I wrote, it's not nice to see how AI is often reinventing the wheel.
What does it mean for open source to survive? Exactly what software are we talking about here?
I don't know about everyone else's experiences, but the AI agent that I use every day at work would rather install a tool or library than spend tokens recreating software that already exists out there. As such, the argument doesn't make much sense to me, personally.
Agree with you on that one, and if the agent somehow tries to re-invent the wheel I will definitely remove the code and do the install myself. I have way more trust for OSS projects maintained by motivated humans (who can be using coding agents if they want, I don't care, as long as project quality remains high).
I told AI to create and editor just like Sublime (my editor for the last decade) and it did in less than 10 minutes. File tree, multi tabs, multi carets, syntax highlighting, code snippets, everything I need in an editor (except LSP for now, will be added in v2)
I haven't used Sublime this week, it works as expected and I can't be happier
Oh, and it cost only $2 to build using DeepSeek
Then I told DeepSeek Harness to build a clone of itself in Swift, unbelievably it did!
So, apps are in a downward spiral towards zero value, everybody can do their own. The real value is in market penetration and the race is going to be fierce
Agents replacing today open-source doesn't means they can do the same in the future. In first place we must all understand that AI is being feeded with existing projects. If we stop creating new projects, may be AI won't have enough base to do the same and the open-source would necessary.
56 comments
[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadChanging oil is easy, it’s disposing of the oil that’s hard and why I don’t change my own oil and haven’t in years.
Not only you're making huge assumptions on AI's ability to build software useable by non-software engineers without professional input, you're also underestimating people's desire to pay just for convenience ("gee, I need a diet tracker, let me find a few people to help me vibe code it instead of paying $10")
Try replicating it with a couple of agents. Not the capabilities, but the performance, stability and dependability and sustainability as well.
Same is true for my favorite text editor on macOS, BBEdit, or IDE of choice, Eclipse. I can increase the number of examples.
These tools are valuable not because they are expensive. They are valuable, or indeed priceless, because of the polish they have. The small features make no sense for a beginner or how they cope when things get absurdly haywire.
Immediate features make us excited and they are easier to replicate because they are visible, but things like performance, dependability, error recovery or the small tweaks they have gone through in the last decade are not, and this is what matters.
We're exploring computing via AI again, and we act that we did nothing in the last 60 years or so. Software and computing is much deeper than it looks at the surface, and we'll learn this in a very very painful way, again.
I’ve seen this claim so many times but I struggle to believe people are running vibe coded software replacements as daily drivers. Certainly not in a professional environment. They are all invariably interesting little projects at best.
I wonder if that will spawn a new type of open source project. Where we have free exchange of ideas, without necessarily requiring the free exchange of code (which would violate a lot of Stallmann's ideas about open source, but might ironically be attractive to people who dislike AI training on their code)
You also need to be ok with your tool to do task A (you had an agent build) to work different from my tool to do task A (I had an agent build). Meaning we can’t reliably compare the output from those tools.
Maybe there will be fewer Open Source contributors. But maybe there will be even more of them with AI making the labor and maintenance easier. Either way I will still be publishing my dinky project, because it works for me, so maybe it'll work for someone else.
Opensource is defined by it's licensing terms and the community around it.
Licensing terms that are now irrelevant, since anyone can use AI to rewrite it without the license.
> the community around it.
Open source communities are dying due to AI spam.
I don’t like the whole “lists” thing, that sounds like literal insanity. But I feel like I can understand the reasoning behind it, even if I think it’s a step too far. “No AI contributions” is easily enough IMO. But then all this is just IMO :)
> your cognitive skills will significantly deteriorate
This is a fair concern. I for one am trying my best to distill the AI's weights into my own brain. My human limitations make this process slow, but I am trying.
At the same time, I'm also vibecoding things I don't fully understand, simply because it'd be foolish to not spend the tokens I paid money for.
I couldn't do that with the proprietary system.
It seems like we'll see a lot more customized open source options or rapidly accelerated open source projects thanks to this type of thing. I'm really curious to see if something like LibreOffice stops playing catchup with Microsoft and actually passes it.
If the improvement rate of Omarchy for Linux desktop experience can be a barometer for anything, I'm extremely optimistic.
The #1 barrier for me to do 90% of the things that I've done for myself over the last 3 months for the prior 10-15 years has been time. I'm more than capable of downloading Frigate and figuring out how to customize everything, modify and compile the code to do what I want, but it would have taken me hours to days to do it. Now I can setup a couple of stacked /goal prompts overnight and get there. It's fantastic.
You also didn't give anything to opensource. This shows that AI can allow open source to be used in more cases and in more flexible ways, but in no way does this mean that open source (and especially the good high quality one) will explode.
If anything we saw an explosion of open source projects, most of them low quality slop, and even the ones that used to be high quality are slowly degrading.
Consider this perspective from a radical humanist populist framework:
Open source is a side effect of an industry so extractive that it can dedicate some of its most talented workers to volunteer in non-competitive ventures. Open source culture is a tacit acknowledgement of a privileged social class that needs not lower itself to brutish competition for its dues, this class instead enjoys the patronage of wealthy benefactors, reminiscent of the enlightenment system of arts which was enabled by the pillaging of a continent. For all the treasures of Europe, hundreds of years later a hole of human deprivation remains bored through the heart of South America. The extremes of noble beneficence and savage exploitation are often found happy bed partners, once the covers are removed.
AI is a reversal of those fortunes, it's democratization of compute. Now anyone literate can write instructions for a computer to do useful work. Certain US labs limiting foreign AI access wasn't a pause to build sufficient security tools to prevent proliferation of powerful op sec weapons (widely reported in government, industry and media), it was about throttling capabilities in poor countries where such software promises the biggest threat to western tech. It's the same reason the giants now murmer about slowing the frontier, they realize they've passed the optimum, any advancement now works against their power and advantage. The problem is, they're spurred forward by naive eastern labs that have never enjoyed the same global dominance. The giants realize the technology is so revolutionary that it could literally devours its masters, but they've made a Faustian bargain and can't help but play to the end.
At the same time, how different is that from much of open source today. Usage is dramatically higher than contributions. How many open source packages are included in every software project we build with. How many of those are any of us contributing back to?
The prevailing moral panic prevents anyone in the space from sharing in communities where open source is generally discussed. People flag and openly disparage (against community guidelines) and have histrionic reactions.
We'll just have to wait until the topic cools off before we can see how llm usage impacts open source.
AI sentence structure spills everywhere
He uses open source and sells it out for cheap marketing. Clients take note.
Author (which seems like AI) has no idea what open source even means.
If you want it to be corrrct, it's always easier to install some existing OSS and instead focus on whatever is unique to you.
For example, a few months ago I was looking to build a license detection tool, and within a few weeks with the help of Claude built a tool that was 20x better than the best open source one I found (I also open sourced mine as well: https://github.com/licensedetector/cli).
The biggest problem will be navigating through the glut of libraries that have been written in my mind -- 100 tools for the same use case, all with < 100 stars will make it hard to decide between. Also, if the user didn't write them thinking about anything other than their own use cases when releasing their library, the standard response will probably be for the agent or programmer to recreate the wheel yet again, only for their specific use case, making it now 101 tools for the same use case.
I don't know about everyone else's experiences, but the AI agent that I use every day at work would rather install a tool or library than spend tokens recreating software that already exists out there. As such, the argument doesn't make much sense to me, personally.
I haven't used Sublime this week, it works as expected and I can't be happier
Oh, and it cost only $2 to build using DeepSeek
Then I told DeepSeek Harness to build a clone of itself in Swift, unbelievably it did!
So, apps are in a downward spiral towards zero value, everybody can do their own. The real value is in market penetration and the race is going to be fierce