In a world where code is cheap, code no longer equals effort. These days, I see consistency, attention to detail, long term support, and community engagement as the signals to read. Not to say this project will never become that, as it may! However until I see those signals as a clear sign of momentum, it's just noise.
Yes, absolutely.
I'll never vibe-code PostgreSQL. I don't want to maintain my own Kubernetes codebase. I happily pay for GitLab Enterprise and Authentik Enterprise.
That said, these small end-user console apps are just noise.
It's so cheap to build something that fits your exact use case that almost everyone does it instead of contributing to an existing project or reading through their AI generated documentation...
And posting it on Hacker News feels like the software developer equivalent of an influencer posting a picture of their lunch.
This is exactly what I did. I create tooling to make it easier for me to manage multiple multi-project swarms across multiple clis (claude, codex, opencode), with queuing, and team sharing.
It was.. surprisingly a little bit under a day's work. It's now heavily tied into our way of working and thinking. This is the upside of the current world.
What used to be time spent in personal, throwaway(ish) shell scripting has now become the same, but for more full fledged tooling. It doesn't need to be consumable by others - but it does need to make my/our life/ves better
isn't this the open source dream? Fork it and make it your own
this a cynical interpretation of it. It reduces OSS to free source code, not as in free speech, but as free beer.
OSS was always about collaborative engineering process. Together we bet the system. Hacking for freedom. Now we reduced it to the modern individualism.