The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

153 pointsposted 6 days ago
by backlit4034
(thoughtworks.com)

146 Comments

overgard

2 days ago

I feel like the AI labs have an embrace-extend-extinguish model here like Microsoft of the 90s. Train your models on all the open source code, then extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) Like, personally I think the reason why AI works as well as it does for typescript is because it's essentially gluing together a lot of open source code written by humans. The interesting functionality is mostly in those libraries. A developer that doesn't want to use AI can still be pretty productive within that context, but if the ecosystem is absolutely decimated..

sshine

2 days ago

> extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!)

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.

overgard

2 days ago

As far as I can tell, Anthropic's entire goal is to extinguish software development as a profession. They're not exactly subtle. If they do that, I don't see how they wouldn't take out open source with it as a consequence. If nobody even looks at code why would anyone bother to publish a library, much less care about making it maintainable? Shit, 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?

sshine

2 days ago

> Anthropic's entire goal is to extinguish software development as a profession

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.

jdkoeck

2 days ago

> 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.

I have some questions.

Are you doing this for client-facing production code?

It seems you believe painting over APIs with some amount of documentation will guarantee the implementation is correct and well designed. Am I misreading that?

You say you still read code when code is « algorithmically hard ». How do you define that?

Software systems have requirements that are essential but not algorithmically hard. For instance, access control in a web application must be thorough and cover all REST resources. How do you know the implementation has the desired properties if you don’t read the code?

Do you have tests? How do you know they’re correct if you don’t read the code? Moreover, how do know if their coverage is sufficient if you don’t read the code?

Do you refactor code or is that not needed anymore?

I don’t understand your answer to the question of why anyone would publish a library if no one reads code anymore. « For the exact same reasons as before ». How so? This isn’t making sense.

sshine

2 hours ago

> Are you doing this for client-facing production code?

What's "this"? We're talking about multiple things here.

But presumably yes: I'm working through agents, and all I do is read and prompt. I don't manually write code except Markdown and occasionally Nix code because it's sufficiently high-level, and I rarely read the Rust code. The Nix code is based on templates I wrote by hand, and the Rust code is based on crate selection and some loose principles I've derived from years of programming Rust by hand.

> It seems you believe painting over APIs with some amount of documentation will guarantee the implementation is correct and well designed. Am I misreading that?

I don't believe that, you're misreading.

I'm saying:

  - Making and documenting APIs well is just as necessary as before I wrote to files.
  - Correctness is achieved through strong types and extensive testing of all kinds.
> Do you have tests? How do you know they’re correct if you don’t read the code? Moreover, how do know if their coverage is sufficient if you don’t read the code?

There are different tests, and I know they work for different reasons.

I'll list a few kinds that I've found actually valuable in the recent past:

Manual user tests: While expensive, they're most truthful in revealing bugs and confirming if they still exist. We do this by dogfooding our own product, and by running manual user tests before major deployments. User tests help uncover problems like delays that don't appear as errors, but can be major UX bugs (like waiting ten seconds for the effect of a button press).

TDD regression tests: A user experiences an error in the application, this gets reported, the agent analyses the code and writes one or more unit tests to confirm the problem, and writes a fix to see the light go green. I know this test works because it fails first. There's an odd chance the agent either uncovered a different bug, or wrote a test that fails synthetically. I haven't tried the latter, but I've tried many times that it wrote "a test" that passes but the app still crashes. So TDD order matters. And I've tried that it found several more bugs by analysing the code. (Most recent example: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/issues/3603 ) Another example of a TDD regression test is: Some async code prematurely exited, I scanned for the class of bugs and found one other case and fixed it, TDD. There's a very simple consideration to make that could be expressed as a linter rule, but is more easily expressed as a single sentence in CLAUDE.md, since it will appear again (it's a pattern I and former colleagues have made several times).

End-to-end integration tests: Wire up all parts of the system in either a semi-authentic (say, docker compose-based with some mocks) or in a fully authentic staging environment (say, Kubernetes); I do both, and it catches both bugs and performance regressions by simulating real workloads. I haven't automated the performance regression testing, only workload simulation, and then I assess the metrics myself.

Algorithmic pareto-optimality: I have an algorithm that can be measured in number of steps by measure of API calls, and number of successful calls; correctness would be "the algorithm gives the same result", and pareto-optimality would be "it doesn't use more steps in the refactored version". Computing time isn't really the cost here, the cumulative size of API payloads are. The API part can actually be mocked, or "made golden" (I've just now learned that it's called a "characterization test", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characterization_test, but I always called it a golden test from having read that.)

"Full coverage unit tests": I don't actually know how valuable these are. But for example, I went with "Find all functions that return Result<T> or Option<T> and test all their edge cases." Some ~87 functions, some ~150 tests. No failures. But I'd be surprised, because the type of mistake these tests generally fix for me, as a human, are typos and copy-paste errors, and big models generally don't make those.

> You say you still read code when code is « algorithmically hard ». How do you define that?

I don't have a good definition. I recently deployed a service that runs something my colleagues call "the algorithm". It's some progressive audio transcription thing. My colleagues feel uncomfortable going live with something that appears to work that nobody read, so I read what was made.

I think the value of reading algorithmically hard code is not to assess correctness, but to regain cognitive debt in case something breaks and you don't know how it's made. I've consulted for people whose main programmer left and they were stuck with a machine they couldn't comprehend, start, or start to comprehend.

Point being: Code review isn't ideal for catching hard logical bugs, it's for understanding code so that you may eventually understand hard logical bugs when they surface.

> Do you refactor code or is that not needed anymore?

The need for software architecting and refactoring are exactly the same.

Only maybe more and sooner because the amount of code increases.

> I don’t understand your answer to the question of why anyone would publish a library if no one reads code anymore. « For the exact same reasons as before ». How so? This isn’t making sense.

I don't understand why it doesn't make sense.

Agents will read code. Humans do occasionally read some code.

But the value of a well-polished, tested library is not just for humans to read.

A good library will make your code better, because vibing on the spot delivers less guarantee that it's good. You'll miss some effort spent on proper data modelling and edge case and error handling. Sometimes that's the right call.

Say you build a parser for a small language. Using a parser combinator library, you get nice error messages and some very non-trivial thoughts on resuming parsing from a failed state. A vibed parser will give you neither of those.

There are some points related to supply-chain minimization.

But it's the exact same tradeoff, where the choice-points are pushed around.

svachalek

2 days ago

Well it's not the dev who would want one, it's the agent, for the same reliability/security reasons that a dev historically would have.

krupan

2 days ago

I think you are correct on how it's playing out because AI cannot write software very well all on its own. The dream is that AI is so good that it can write all the code you need from scratch, replacing all and any code written by anyone else, but that's not happening

sshine

2 days ago

With guidance, it kind of is happening.

While, simultaneously, an abundance of slop is being made.

selectodude

2 days ago

GPT-5.6 just finished writing a shim for me in rust that sits between Broadcom’s bullshit kernel and a standard Linux user space to turn my mesh routers into standard computers. At some point I’m not sure what the difference is in practice.

Note: I can’t code. Not a line.

adithyassekhar

2 days ago

That is amazing, I am surprised how the other replies to your comment just ignore that aspect pf it.

selectodude

a day ago

I thought it was cool too, though I understand AI use is a heated debate and I think people get their backs up that some dumb illiterate like me who can't code has ghidra on my laptop decompiling kernel headers. I get it, the deluge is coming for my job too.

vinceguidry

2 days ago

What do you need your tiny routers to do?

selectodude

a day ago

Not run all of ASUS's unstable garbage software.

smcnally

2 days ago

Does this work on early Velop mesh nodes, by chance?

selectodude

a day ago

Doubt it - Linksys encrypts their firmware. ASUS not only doesn't, but left everything in the binary that made it really easy for GPT-5.6 to crack it open and decompile everything in ghidra.

socialcommenter

2 days ago

> Maintainer exhaustion is totally a secondary effect, not intended.

Malice, incompetence, etc. My question is, how much does it matter _why_ the problem exists because of AI/is being exacerbated by AI?

watwut

2 days ago

> That is neither the incentive of AI companies nor the truth

They literally sell themselves to investors as the thing that will destroy everything people create. That is their bragging point. And they are using things people created to destroy them and their future work.

Those are their openly stated goals. Which they claimed to achieve 2 years ago.

efitz

2 days ago

Nowadays reading HN comments I imagine what it was like watching a buggy whip manufacturers meeting around the time of Henry Ford. The world is changing and many previous assumptions are being exposed as not widely held.

Most people in the world don’t care how software comes into existence or what the source code looks like, and never did. Just like most people never cared how most anything else was made. We are seeing software turn from a handcrafted commodity to a mass produced product. The quality is getting better and the cost of production is getting cheaper and this is happening at an astonishing rate.

The world is changing. As much as you enjoyed lovingly crafting buggy whips; most people just want the car. It’s not cruelty; it’s that buggy whips were never the point.

overgard

an hour ago

I don't think this analogy holds. I'll give you an example of why.

One of my skills is graphics programming. A decade ago, a huge part of my job was writing special effect shaders for videogames -- kind of as a technical artist (although that wasn't my exact title). One of the things I saw coming was that shaders were being created by shader graphs, which allowed non-technical artists to do a lot of the same things. This was fine though! You know why? Because I could reskill into new things, and a lot of my old knowledge was still useful.

If these oligarchs get what they want, "the nerd reich" is I think we should start calling them (these people are insanely far right), there would be nothing to reskill into. It's not "buggy whips are gone so I should work on cars", it's "I guess I'm just living off disability checks now?" I don't know why anyone not directly affiliated with an AI company is ok with that! It's not "progress" to destroy the entire economy. I don't think they can ACCOMPLISH that, because frankly they're mostly incredibly stupid, but that's absolutely what they want.

epihelix

a day ago

I didn't know that people used to make buggy whips for free and give them away?

The thing about FOSS that everyone keeps forgetting is that it sits outside the market economy.

We write FOSS code because we love doing it, and love giving it away. If nobody else uses my code, I don't care - I'll still write it and still release it. That's the way it's always been, and LLMs will not change this (quite the contrary - they make it easier to realise and maintain FOSS projects).

tonyedgecombe

2 days ago

>most people just want the car.

That didn’t happen on its own. It took a huge amount of marketing and lobbying to get where we are today.

worthless-trash

a day ago

I see more of it like cannibals sitting around a fire, trying to decide where they get their next meal from while side-eying their neighbors body fat percentage.

JackSlateur

2 hours ago

You are correct, AI is sold as a self-fullfilling prophecy

People are thinking that AI will become better than human. It is easier to make humans worse than AI.

pryelluw

2 days ago

I’ve stopped all my open source contributions and projects. I’ve now moved my resources to organizing and supporting communities like python Atlanta. My commitment was always the community and not the code. I also want to see what will companies do once open source closes shop and fewer people know how to program. It’s why I’m making sure there is a local support network for those of us who still want to stay in software over the long term.

pixl97

2 days ago

I don't think the battle will be in open source software... I think it will be in hardware at our current rate.

There has been ever increasing consolidation in the hardware world along with an ever growing acceptance of restrictions by the public 'for our safety'.

matheusmoreira

2 days ago

Yeah. Manufacturers are simultaneously pricing and locking us out of silicon. Computers are moving back to big iron tier mainframes, and it looks like remote attestation is the future so any non-corporate owned device will be essentially useless. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it, or if we're ostracized from digital society should we figure out how to run it.

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.

ColdStream

2 days ago

This is why I hope more people start to get behind the 'Perma computing' movement.

https://permacomputing.net/

Even if you don't agree with the exact political stances of the authors, the broad goals are notable.

I have said it for years now, perma-computing is the missing piece of the free software movement. There is no point in the software being complete free/open if you have hardware that is locked down.

Maybe one day, we will be fabing our computers, maybe not on a garage scale but on a much more local manufacturer scale. Similar to how you can get PCB's custom made but with open processor designs. Nothing too amazing but if you could pick or supply a chip design and have something made on a 300nm node or whatever, that is still a lot of power to the people. Chips that top out at a few million transistors not billion/trillions.

You can do computing up to the level of the mid 90's, which is neat but that is the big trade off you need to make.

mcbishop

2 days ago

I'm happy to now know about perma computing.

> up to the level of the mid 90s

So pair this with back-to-basics tech (e.g. text files)... that can serve us extremely well.

henry_bone

2 days ago

From that link:-

"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."

They are post-modernist, collectivist, marxist. I couldn't get behind that.

That ideology is arguably the most destructive in human history.

kubanczyk

a day ago

Nothing in this list implies "post-modernist", and post-marxism does not imply "marxist".

kgwxd

2 days ago

I just got one of those M5 meshtastic things with a keyboard and screen. My kid is in love with it. We're just messaging each other for now, but there's a lot of nodes in our area, so we're going to get a few more devices for family/friends in the area.

m4rtink

2 days ago

Check also MeshCore - works on the same hardware as MeshTastic (just flash a different firmware) and has some nice new features and seems to scale better than MeshTastic in big meshes. :)

whstl

2 days ago

This is doubly bad with, in some cases, governments, banks and other institutions pretty much forcing us to own those locked-in devices to run their apps.

ColdStream

2 days ago

Personally it is looking like I will have a device like that to do those few things, and another that I can actually control, well at least until the signal leave the device.

whattheheckheck

2 days ago

Regression to the mean of shitty monarchy bullshit in the grand scheme of things

sshine

2 days ago

I recently set up a Forgejo instance for a personal infrastructure project, and because of security, it’s read-only. So I just disable all the “issues”, “pull requests”, “wiki”. It’s a little sad, but also gratifying to know that I’m making stuff available, but I am not looking for any and every chance to have a conversation about it.

marcus_holmes

2 days ago

We're already seeing what happens: the agents write the code instead of importing the dependency.

This is happening at the moment because of the supply chain risks of dependencies. But if all the open projects stop being maintained it'll just happen more.

jasonkester

2 days ago

I had to flag this article for violating HN's policy against submitting things written by AI.

Which is a shame, because the premise is intriguing. But it's pretty rude to expect every one of us to sift through ten pages of AI tells to reverse engineer the prompts that hold the information the author wanted to convey. As the saying goes, "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?"

So I ask the Author: Please write this article for us using your own words, taking your own time to convey your thoughts. Submit it and let us read it.

I bet it will be better than this.

tonyedgecombe

2 days ago

I’m not sure which is worse, content written by AI or people complaining about content being written by AI.

yummybrainz

a day ago

Pretty sure it's the former!

willismichael

a day ago

No way, it's AI generated content complaining about AI generated content.

scratcheee

a day ago

When it comes to fluff/slop/etc, worse can be measured by word count, so there’s your answer.

mikkolaakkonen

2 days ago

I totally agree, would love to read this "properly" !

a-french-anon

2 days ago

Even more outrageous: there are two authors listed.

robotmaxtron

2 days ago

The agentic era definition of open source is garbage.

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.

mike_hock

2 days ago

Also, slop code is not open source. It's not source, it's a build artifact. The prompt is the source. But we don't have a deterministic build system for it so publishing the prompt isn't even useful.

robotmaxtron

2 days ago

imho the prompt is part of a "design", not a build artifact (unless your build system is weird).

a deterministic build system for prompts is a called a compiler.

jaxn

2 days ago

they are saying the prompt is the source, the code is the artifact. I think it is a valid comparison. when reviewing a PR, I do want to see the prompt(s) that generated the change.

folkrav

2 days ago

My latest feature was an overarching change across 4 different stacks, about a full work day of going back and forth iterating on different designs, generating workarounds for stack/language specific quirks and the business' usage patterns. Multiple fresh agent sessions, review passes, exploratory work with subagents, etc. "The prompt(s) that generated the change" in that context is multiple hours of discussion, Q&A, refactoring and feedback. Is that really the value, pages and pages of reactive prompting?

jaxn

2 days ago

Yes. Because that is where the intent is/was. In the future, as more changes are made, having the history of the intent is helpful context. And in that back and forth there are also details of what you didn't want, and why. Some of that can be captured in decision docs, etc.

when devs work in isolation, that context/memory is siloed. Same is true when working across platforms (codex, claude, etc).

lstodd

2 days ago

Yes.

The value is in how you came to the design you expressed.

folkrav

a day ago

What puzzles me is, what matters is context. Most of the context would be the specific model I used and its training data, the result of tool calls, and the model's inner monologue/thinking (which is increasingly getting encrypted by frontier models). My prompts are a tiny sliver of that, and most of them dependended on the actual answers I was getting from the model in the middle of the whole process. Or the result of handoffs, or internal compactions.

What's the value of getting all my prompts if the rest of the equation is unknowable? Unless you mean the value is in the full agent log, but even then, frontier models and harnesses would still be hiding a major part of the equation from us.

zeroimpl

2 days ago

Wouldn’t the same argument apply even if they didn’t use AI? Being able to drill into coworkers minds would be nice on many occasions.

pmontra

2 days ago

I'm not sure what level of detail those prompts you write about have so I might misunderstand you.

Before AI we had prompts called "requirements" and of course they were the starting point for reviewing code: the customer needs X, the code doing that is Y.

With agents that prompt became much longer, with the original requirement a short note at the beginning of the conversation with the AI, but the resulting code is about the same size. Maybe in YOLO development the original requirement is all the AI needs but I'll be surprised because requirements from customers are too fuzzy and can be turned into very different features, often too different from what the customers had in mind.

Actually I never looked at the detailed prompts of coworkers, only at the original requirements from customers. How they instructed their agents is not particularly interesting except maybe to get a gist of the different approaches.

submeta

2 days ago

Which prompt, though? Just the initial one, or the entire conversation? During a project you’ll prompt the agent dozens of times. Are all of those prompts considered the source?

datakan

2 days ago

>"For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain."

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.

magicalist

2 days ago

> It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise.

Yes, it's always been accepted that someone has to support it, but someone else, not me. But these are important dependencies so I'm sure someone will support them.

It's such a common situation that there's a six year old xkcd about it that felt about ten years late at the time.

simoncion

2 days ago

> I don't know anyone that has ever thought this.

I've known many people who have thought that. None of them were programmers, and many of them were managers.

krupan

2 days ago

"One participant at the retreat noted that permissive licensing was a profound collective mistake, serving as a legal mechanism that enabled the world’s largest corporations to cannibalize volunteer labor..."

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

ColdStream

2 days ago

It is amazing how the GPL has inadvertently held up against newer technologies that they couldn't conceive of or just didn't think were a big issue at the time.

Also, you can make propitiatory changes if it is contained within the business. Once you make them public is when there is an issue. But I doubt folks would be wanting to keep patching in their proprietary stuff with every new Linux kernel for instance.

bitbasher

2 days ago

I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read.

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.

conartist6

2 days ago

Nothing that was possible then is less possible or less potent now.

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

magicalist

2 days ago

> 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

So...the worse things are the better because we have more things to improve? Wouldn't it just be better if things weren't worse?

Can't entirely tell if this is supposed to be inspirational or contrarian (I think maybe the first one?), but every bit of shit in a situation being something we can look forward to overcoming by crawling through it isn't the most heart stirring way to look at it and also seems a bit dismissive without engaging with the actual subject.

conartist6

2 days ago

Well I'm hopeful because I'm not a passive observer here, but rather a bazaar builder.

I could talk for hours. If you want to hear what I have to say at length, come to the place where I build: https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX

inigyou

2 days ago

The bazaar has been overrun by an army of Cave Johnson's mantis-men. The cathedral is keeping its doors shut, carving out a mantis-free space inside. Occasionally they do controlled experiments on caged mantises.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

phkahler

2 days ago

Yeah Eric Raymond and open source were a bad move. Should have stuck to Free Software - as in GPL license. All that open source stuff was deliberately made corporation-friendly, which is not what's in the best interest of the code.

ColdStream

2 days ago

Yep, they took the eye off the ball. Instead of growing free software the harder but much more resilient way, they caved to corporations in the name of quick results. But those quick results have ultimately back fired on them a little.

Open source is huge now but it has lost a lot of the enthusiasm. Much of it feels like just putting out code waiting to be absorbed by some larger parasitic entity that has a marketing team.

Unfortunately, corporate doesn't like the word ethics.

It was funny when GPL 3 came along and it completely leveled the playing field so that they couldn't just take code and not allow modified execution on their devices. Apple suck on GPL2 2008 release GNU tooling for over a decade until they could build alternatives. That they would rather reinvent the wheel than let people use their own software was wild!

Same thing happened when they stripped out the ethics from veganism to make 'plant based diets'. It worked for a while but without the ethics based foundations it just couldn't last.

lstodd

2 days ago

There were ethics in veganism? Since when? It was always a religious movement, all the way back to Vedanta. A way to set yourself apart and then maybe feel better for not being "like those others".

hailvectron

2 days ago

There always have been. As a practicing vegan of over 20 years, I made the change consciously for ethical and moral reasons with no interest in "setting myself apart" or "feeling better for not 'being like those others'" by this decision. I do not proselytize, and try hard to not discuss this aspect of my lifestyle unless it becomes awkward to avoid it. Equating veganism to faith movements is superficial. Stating that people choose it to make statements to other people is cynical.

Also I don't know what GP is talking about when it comes to "it just couldn't last." Being vegan can still be a pain in the ass, but it's vastly easier to find "plant-based" options than it was 20 years ago. There seem to be more options every year.

rixed

2 days ago

  >  I made the change consciously for ethical and moral reasons with no interest in "setting myself apart" or "feeling better for not 'being like those others'" by this decision
We all believe we do what we do for good reasons, yet we are wrong most of the times.

So, when I hear you saying that you are motivated by pure moral reasons, but not stating those reasons, I can't help but think "this guy is lying to himself", sorry.

Listen, I consider myself some kind of vegetarian: I feel shame for how we humans treat other animals in the food industry, I don't want to take part in it; therefore, I rarely buy meat (I rarely buy anything, actually). But when I go someplace and I'm not the cook, it won't even cross my mind to ask for "a vegetarian alternative"; I eat what is there because it doesn't matter. During the meal I might engage a discussion about how badly we treat animals and we could avoid participating. Not eating or cooking meat is not the point at all, not buying it is the point.

I have met a lot of vegetarians who just "can't eat meat", won't tell why, require a specific meal be prepared for them, exactly like some religious people won't eat pork or wtv, without ever explaining why not. Because they don't want to do proselytism or because they don't want to sound stupid? I'm sure which alternative you will choose for yourself, but I'm not convinced.

markhahn

2 days ago

uh-huh. and what source code do you think coding models are trained on?

bitwize

a day ago

The fact that Eric Raymond has gone full fascist in the intervening years was absolutely not on my bingo card back in the late 90s, but it makes CatB even less relevant now.

Of course, he would tell you otherwise. He would say that the victory of the bazaar over the cathedral has only been accelerated by AI; indeed, he doesn't write code anymore and uses LLMs to develop everything. The scary part is, he might be right about that.

user

a day ago

[deleted]

zzzeek

2 days ago

the issue with articles that try to analyze the state of open source and its sustainability and all that is that nothing about open source makes any sense if you just talk about it. Imagine you're transported to 1977 and you work at IBM and you try to tell them, oh hey I have an idea, how about the OS everyone uses for literally all commerce, communication, military, etc., you name it, will be written by one guy in his spare time and later maintained by tens of thousands of mostly unpaid volunteers. "Don't other companies try to copy it and sell it as their own?" "Well sure, but mostly it's better to use the free one everyone knows". Try selling your manager at IBM in 1977 that idea for new software. It would be impossible. It would be impossible today.

Trying to explain how the global economy and welfare of most of humanity is hugely dependent on free software production labor, without the advent of actually seeing a world where this actually happens, is just like when we try to explain something like consciousness. There is no explanation that makes sense. So predictions about new avenues of doom (like "MIT licensing was a huge mistake! we should have all been GPL!") similarly dont carry a lot of weight, because of course these predictions make perfect sense in the abstract, yet real world results don't line up at all.

Basically open source software is an emergent phenomenon, like consciousness or evolution, or perhaps even how very large language models suddenly seemed like real people. It's something that would never be predictable in its own absence, which means it will remain largely unpredictable how it will respond to ongoing changes such as "the open source authors and contributors now use programs themselves to produce more code".

rixed

2 days ago

How do you prove a system is chaotic in sociology? Without such a proof, isn't it natural to try to explain in retrospect even the systems you failed to predict?

phkahler

2 days ago

Permissive licensing is a large part of the issue TFA is talking about. GPL does not have those issues. All FLOSS suffers from AI ingesting the code and being able to output work-alike programs to some extent, but for now large GPL programs - Inkscape, Firefox, VLC, Blender, FreeCAD, KiCAD, the Linux kernel, etc are all safe - none of them are permissively licensed so nobody can proprietize them (is that a word?)

Unfortunately (in my opinion) the rewrite it in Rust movement also abandoned non-permissive licensing, so over time a progressively larger body of work will fall to this.

Chu4eeno

2 days ago

> All FLOSS suffers from AI ingesting the code and being able to output work-alike programs to some extent

You can also just set some LLM in a loop up with objdump and a C compiler and "copyright-wash" work-alikes of any proprietary software out there. Can't wait for someone to start burning tokens on doing it to baseband firmware and watch everyone who cheered on the non-GPL chardet (plus regulators) squirm.

arjie

2 days ago

The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit. Today, I can replicate most software that way. So the promise is more realized than before. The actual code is useful, yes, because it means I don't have to have it written but if it didn't exist I'd still get there.

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.

jeremyjh

2 days ago

The software you have generated for your personal use is a micro fraction of all the software that it uses directly and indirectly to fulfill your needs. The rest is OSS maintained by someone at no cost to you.

arjie

2 days ago

The rest is not OSS. Some of it is. Lots of it is proprietary software too and maintained at no cost to me. I can't imagine how much network switching software my stuff goes through. Didn't pay anything for that.

jeremyjh

2 days ago

If you pay someone for internet access you are paying for most of that, and I’m guessing you paid for the switch and router in your own house. But I was talking about the software running on your computer that your code invokes.

arjie

2 days ago

Sure, and I paid for all the contributions to Linux too in that respect. It's fine, if the unpaid ones want to not do any more work, that's fine too. It was always about user freedom, and now we have it.

jaggederest

2 days ago

I honestly wonder about what percentage of the toxicity of society is a result of the awful copyright regime. Certainly another good chunk is a result of the patent system being broken.

I guess these are not the top items in the societal problems list, but they really don't help.

ColdStream

2 days ago

It is odd when you see people freaking out about copyright and patents when they typically have neither of those things personally. They advocate for the intellectual prison.

Not the worst thing society has done but it does end up positioning people as being convinced that they must be beholden to corporations wants.

magicalist

2 days ago

> It is odd when you see people freaking out about copyright and patents when they typically have neither of those things personally. They advocate for the intellectual prison.

You have at least two comments in this thread lauding the GPL and its effects. So aren't you advocating for the intellectual prison as well?

rixed

2 days ago

I would be fully onboard with you if the tools to generate all the code anyone need would not be proprietary and would run on a personal computer anyone could buy.

Forgeties79

2 days ago

> The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit.

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.

physix

2 days ago

I think the article is really good, until it starts to offer guidance and making suggestions for the future.

I can't pin it down precisely, but my feeling is that it doesn't fully recognize the fundamental shift taking place. In a sense it's not radical enough, trying more to keep a system afloat whose foundation is being dismantled.

The forces that gave rise to open source will find a new way, because they are based on the nature of the human spirit. We just don't know what it will look like yet.

erelong

2 days ago

I think one of the other comments gets in to it, but it's really either AI gets good enough so we can accelerate OSS development with agents, or it's not good enough and that will probably force a pull-back towards more manually created code

(and so no need to worry too much either way as the issue will sort itself out?)

calvinmorrison

2 days ago

The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era.

Here's my thoughts on this. It's back to open source, not open maintainer or open usage. I am producing lots of new code, i am publishing it. I am NOT interested in starting a project or having other people contribute. It's a cambrian explosion, the cost of adding features is basically zero. I'm going with "patching software is more common and we need tools around patching" rather than using other peoples stuff, just take what you want and fix it.

One stupid one is XRDP required some hack to go through VNC to connect to an existing session. I now have it built into xrdp and lets you pick the X11 session you on dial up and you're good to go. Why is this not a feature I dont know, but xrdp does it all now without vnc or anything. good stuff. i published it sure, i dont care if anyone uses it though.

bhaak

2 days ago

> the cost of adding features is basically zero

Adding features was always the easy part. Maintaining the code OTOH is not going to be easier.

I see this with an experimental project I’m consciously vibecoding. The code base tends towards a spaghetti coded mess.

Of course you can put in some refactoring prompts and the AI will reorganize the code. But that makes it worse actually.

You have no mental model of the code and after a large refactoring even less.

calvinmorrison

2 days ago

adding features was not the easy part for me - in fact it was a barrier for expressing most ideas I had.

richardjennings

2 days ago

This goes one of two ways.

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.

jeremyjh

2 days ago

Personally I’ve been forking a lot more OSS and modifying it for my own use with little regard to contributing back because I haven’t read any of it myself and am not going to make public claims about it. It used to be I’d spend hours or days fixing a bug or adding a feature and getting it merged upstream seemed to help validate that effort. Now there is no effort so no need for validation and I continue on my 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.

phkahler

2 days ago

>> The commits are in my fork if anyone wants them but I can’t imagine why anyone would.

This recently happened with solvespace (I am a maintainer). Someone posted a link to a fork with a bunch of goodies added. I think they just had AI implement some big features that had already been discussed and were either rejected or far future/maybe. That fork still exists but looks to be dead, as there hasn't been any new development since it first appeared. I had a good look at all the commits but I don't see any that I really want to grab as-is. Some of it looked a bit promising though.

I recommend you at least make upstream aware of your fork if there is anything in it that they might want.

markhahn

2 days ago

smells of AI-pilled management viewpoint. the kind who think that AI has already changed the whole software landscape.

mahirsaid

2 days ago

Just to mention the hosting of open-source software that isn't reliable. This not only creates a level of uncertainty, but causes lack of trust. The systems a whole is becoming neglected. Microsoft v=benefited from numerous open-source software, yet all there worried about is their subscriptions.

osk9934

10 hours ago

an article written by AI to complain about AI

full of tells like overuse of "load-bearing"

aniceperson

2 days ago

> Maintainers of load-bearing open-source packages — the invisible pillars holding up modern digital banking

Hi claude

calvinmorrison

2 days ago

Shift from passive consumption to active ownership.

Implement rigid supply chain auditing.

Formalize an open source contribution and patronage budget.

Well none of these help my bottom line directly so my boss will not approve.

bigwhite

2 days ago

With the lowering of implementation barriers—approaching a near-zero entry threshold—more open-source software will emerge. But at the same time, more “one-off open-source” projects will also appear. Their characteristics are:

- They meet the localized needs of the original author or a certain subset of people. - They very likely will not be continuously maintained.

0xferruccio

2 days ago

The irony of this article is that it reads with the annoying robotic cadence that makes me not want to read slop blogs

Sentences like "The licensing paradox: From freedom to exploitation" are starting to burn my eyes

nullorempty

2 days ago

My reaction is to the discussion more than the the article.

Many have noted that LLMs are relatively good at writing code because they learned from all the code and other material, such as books, written before.

But let's say that we no longer produce the learning material, will LLMs be able to progress on their own or the slop they make (and read) will eventually lead to the decay of the models?

Will the models decay if left to their own devices?

socalgal2

2 days ago

> For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain.

This is provably false and wish that sentiment would die

Microsoft spends at least $600-$800 million on open source The make VS Code, .NET/C#, Edge, TypeScript. They provide free hosting, free CIs, free issues, discussions, free webpages (github). Google spends similar amounts on Chromium, Angular, Go, Flutter, Gemma, etc...

Meta spends similar amounts on React, PyTorch, Presto, Llama

Amazon sends 200-300 million on valkey, OpenSearch, FireCracker, and has dedicated engineers for Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Rust

Apple provide swift, WebKit, Clang/LLVM - there spending is also in the 100-200 million range.

That's on top of employees at almost all of those companies fixing bugs and providing patches for everything they use.

People make up the claims like the OP with zero actual evidence.

pmontra

2 days ago

All of those companies have very compelling reasons to provide those tools for free, as in (most importantly dor adoption) no money asked and (less importantly) open source. They make money because of the number of people using those tools. They are a bridge head into controlling their own share of the market.

So: investment, not good will.

Bruises

a day ago

I'm not sure if you just missed that the OP said "myth" because you seem to be in complete agreement with them.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

zcw100

2 days ago

People need to stop yelling "Slop!" all the time and saying silly things like "every line of code was reviewed by a human". First, it's ridiculous. There is no possible way to verify that claim, determine what was or wasn't done after reviewing it, and there's no reason to review every single line. It's performative. I have a ton of stuff I haven't bothered contributing. Why? So I can deal with all the hate? When it was "many hands make light work" there was value in sharing the load. Now I've got a backhoe and it's not worth the hassle.

linsomniac

2 days ago

>People need to stop yelling "Slop!" all the time

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!

overgard

2 days ago

It's not performative though. Slop is a burden. I'm sorry you feel excluded by that, but an AI generated PR is not of much value. The maintainer could just as easily do that, if that's what they wanted. Plus lets be realistic about why people contribute slop PRs, it's not for the betterment of the project usually, it's because they either want credit for a "contribution" they didn't bother to make themselves (If you give credit for that, then being a "contributor" is a worthless badge), or they're spamming people for bug bounties.

inigyou

2 days ago

It's an underrated point that providing LLM output to someone else is worthless because if they wanted it, they could put in the same input.

quantummagic

2 days ago

Forming the prompt is still a skill, tokens aren't free, and it all takes some time and attention, which also has a price. So someone else doing that for you isn't exactly worthless, if they do a good job of it.

overgard

an hour ago

Forming prompts is not a noteworthy skill. This is just a PM fantasy.

inigyou

a day ago

If they do a good job of it it won't be identifiable as AI output.

antoineleclair

2 days ago

I stopped reading at "load-bearing" and em dash.

drusepth

2 days ago

Ironically, the prevalence of AI "tells" like that (combined with the ubiquity of AI works passed off as human-written) will inevitably feed back into more use by non-AI writers who think they're normal.

(Also, I'm never gonna give up my em dashes.)

asdff

2 days ago

This assumes non ai writers are drinking from the well of slop. Not all of course. Some people still read old books.

pixl97

2 days ago

Old books don't tell you much about now in a great number of topics.

>Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

We're very familiar with this effect when it comes to the news, but since a lot of people are now looking at older information as some kind of escape it seems prudent to point out that old books themselves are of varying quality.

Moreso, how do you track said quality of old books in the modern age where their will be incentives to game the system (for example those that own publishing rights to said books). Some books will be high quality, but the information in them will be outdated due to changes in understanding. Other books might as well have been written by AI and transported to the past they hold so many bullshit claims.

The pareto distribution will cover the most popular books, but once you step into the long tail of research you've hit another no mans land of is it true or not.

asdff

2 days ago

Reference material is one thing. But literature is pretty timeless. And there are used bookstores and public libraries.

pixl97

2 days ago

You might underestimate the amount of pulp paperbacks that have been printed over the years. Quite often these are just a single step above AI slop.

asdff

2 days ago

Sure, and it infests the little free 'libraries' you see scattered around the neighborhood and often the shelves in the Goodwill, but a good used bookstore and a good public library system will do a bit of filtering on that. These places aren't firehoses.

unlogic

2 days ago

85% AI according to Pangram.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

theturtletalks

2 days ago

Open-source alternatives are being launched at an ungodly pace and they are really polished. All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast. If the builder actually uses the software he's building, the feedback loop is really efficient.

I keep a directory of open-source alternatives and just in the past month, I've replaced applications I've used for years with open-source alternatives.

cdrini

2 days ago

What open source alternatives have you switched to recently? Always on the lookout for good OS tools!

theturtletalks

2 days ago

I replaced Raycast recently with Sol[0], but SuperCmd[1] is also really good.

And I’m testing Helium Browser[2]. It’s based on Chromium, but has changed a lot under the hood and I’ve been daily driving it.

Also replacing CapCut with OpenCut[3].

I’ve also completely ditched Codex CLI with Pi[4] and now am trying OMP[5].

0. https://github.com/ospfranco/sol

1. https://github.com/SuperCmdLabs/SuperCmd

2. https://github.com/imputnet/helium

3. https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut

4. https://github.com/earendil-works/pi

5. https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi

Cider9986

2 days ago

OpenCode

SuperCMD

Zed

Typewhisper

SeoFood

2 days ago

<3

Cider9986

2 days ago

I vouched for your recent submission which was dead, might improve your account standing so it doesn't happen again.

I'm curious how you found my comment mentioning TypeWhisper.

I was also wondering about clarification about the apple speech services. Because in the app it says they are on device (I have an m series Mac latest version) but in keyboard settings in MacOS it says many things would be shared with Apple.

It's not a huge issue because I'll just use that other model, which is fantastic, but I'm curious.

theturtletalks

2 days ago

TypeWhisper looks really nice man, great work. I’ll add it to my directory and sorry HN marked it dead. I also post open-source projects and HN marks it dead as well. Feel like the system is broken or people just flag anything they don’t like.

Cider9986

2 days ago

It was a new account with 0 interaction, it was not manually flagged. Only the second time with a GitHub link was it killed.

The system is trying its best with all the AI slop. People can email the site admins if their posts are getting unjustly killed.

PunchyHamster

2 days ago

The problem is as usual, users. AI for maintenance (updating & testing deps, re-writing parts to run with next major version of lib) is pretty low error % and just need some supervision and can make it more effective, in hands of people already familiar with project

But the flipside is of course users that are clueless won't now be stopped by "can't make a PR", they will throw prompt at AI and send it when the AI decides it's good enough

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

sshine

2 days ago

> All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast.

Both of these are true: we’re witnessing an unprecedented amount of slop, while also the tools get better and better.

So when talking about Open Source maintainer exhaustion, it’s because of the slop, not because of the great tooling.

AI is an amplifier, and in this case it amplifies the great asymmetry between contributor and maintainer.

pixl97

2 days ago

The 80/20 rule and bullshit asymmetry apply here.

Kind of like going to the app store and picking the app with the most downloads because the other option is looking at 400 different apps that may or may not do the same thing.

sschueller

2 days ago

I love maintaining open source in an agentic world. I can be a complete asshole about contribution rules and coding standard as long as I define the AGENTS.md. The more strict the better and I can get good clean pull request without an endless back and fourth. I can even require updating the documentation!

An OCD dream but you need to embrace it and configure it or you would get "AI slop".

jeremyjh

2 days ago

Could you share a link to an example? I couldn’t find any PRs you merged this year.