21 ms·

Vibe coding kills open source

330 points by kgwgk 9mo ago

linuxftw 9mo ago
Is arxiv.org the new medium.com now? Seems like recently there has been a plethora of blog-level submissions from there to HN recently.
ktallett 9mo ago
I think vibe coding would greatly struggle with large open source projects unless your planning was exceptional and your comments on optimal coding style was exceptional, however...... For those small open source tools that many of us use daily and find invaluable, I actually think vibe coding is ideal for that. It can make a functional version quickly and you can iterate and improve it, and feel no loss for making it free to use. I was very sceptical but I will admit I think vibe coding has a place in society, just what it is yet is still to be determined. It can't help most for sure but it can help some in some situations.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  > For those small open source tools that many of us use daily and find invaluable, I actually think vibe coding is ideal for that. If they don't exist, AND the author is comitted to maintaining them instead of just putting it online, sure. But one issue I see is that a lot of these tools you describe already exist, so creating another one (using code assist tools or otherwise) just adds noise IMO. The better choice is to research and plan (as you say in your first sentence) before comitting resources. The barrier to "NIH" is lowered through code assistants, which risks reducing collaboration in open source land in favor of "I'll just write my own". Granted, "I'll write my own" has always felt like it has a lower barrier to entry than "I'm going to search for this tool and learn to use it".
- cess11 9mo ago
  The authors try to study the effect of people not engaging directly with OSS projects because they substitute for this with a gang of chatbots, and draw the conclusion that this lack of contact with actual people means they'll be less likely to help finance OSS development.
- data-ottawa 9mo ago
  There are three or four projects I've always wanted to do, but were frontloaded with a lot of complexity and drudgery. Maybe the best feature of vibe coding is that it makes the regret factor of poor early choices much lower. Its kind of magic to go "you know what, I was wrong, let's try this approach instead" and not having to spend huge amounts of time fixing things or rewriting 80% of the project. It's made it a lot more fun to try building big projects on my own, where I would go into decision paralysis or prematurely optimize and never start the meat or learning of the core project. Its also been nice to have agents review my projects for major issues, so I feel more confident sharing them.
  - fc417fc802 9mo ago
    > go into decision paralysis or prematurely optimize Setting out to implement a feature only to immediately get bogged down in details that I could probably get away with glossing over. LLMs short circuit that by just spitting something out immediately. Of course it's of questionable quality, but once you get something working you can always come back and improve it.
- hayd 9mo ago
  I think one of the things that will need to be embraced is carefully curating .md context files to give the prompts better/shared direction to contributors. Things like any new feature or fix should include a test case (in the right place), functions should re-use existing library code wherever possible, function signatures should never change in a backwards-incompatible way, any code changes should pass the linter, etc etc. And ideally ensure the agent writes code that's going to be to the maintainer's "taste". I haven't worked out how to do this for my own projects. Once you've set it up it's not too hard to imagine an AI giving an initial PR assessment... to discard the worst AI slop, offer some stylistic feedback, or suggest performance concerns.
Sharlin 9mo ago
No problem! Just give the agents the ability to autonomously report issues, submit patches, and engage with library authors. Surely nothing can go wrong.
tosh 9mo ago
generative ai increases ambition, lowers barriers more open source, better open source perhaps also more forking (not only absolute but also relative) contribution dynamics are also changing I'm fairly optimistic that generative ai is good for open source and the commons what I'm also seeing is open source projects that had not so great ergonomics or user interfaces in general are now getting better thanks to generative ai this might be the most directly noticeable change for users of niche open source
- avaer 9mo ago
  What do you think of the paper's research claims that the returns for maintainers are reduced and sharing is decreasing?
  - positron26 9mo ago
    Without real finance model innovation, what returns?
    - avaer 9mo ago
      The same kind of returns that power research academia, where the amount of money you make is determined by the number of citations on your papers. Except it's on Github and it's forks and starts.
    - mr_spothawk 9mo ago
      I upvoted your comment. Also, it's a scarcity mindset. I don't agree that sibling to my comment: "make money by getting papers cited". it is not a long-term solution, much as Ad revenue is broken model for free software, also. I'm hopeful that we see some vibe-coders get some products out that make money, and then pay to support the system they rely on for creating/maintaining their code. Not sure what else to hope for, in terms of maintaining the public goods.
      - positron26 9mo ago
        Any "exposure" economy has real money somewhere else turning the wheel. If that money isn't sensitive to healthy signal, neither is the downstream. Well-wishers are just alternative perpetual motion machine enthusiasts.
lukan 9mo ago
"Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns." I think the title is clickbait. The conclusion is: "Vibe coding represents a fundamental shift in how software is produced and consumed. The productivity gains are real and large. But so is the threat to the open source ecosystem that underpins modern software infrastructure. The model shows that these gains and threats are not independent: the same technology that lowers costs also erodes the engagement that sustains voluntary contribution." The dangers I see rather in projects drowning in LLM slop PR's, instead of less engagement. And the benefits of LLMs to open source in lowering the cost to revive and maintain (abandoned) projects.
- positron26 9mo ago
  What even is "engagement" here? Seems like abstract harm that rationalizes whatever emotion the reader already feels.
- wolfi1 9mo ago
  do you have experience in reviving an abandoned project? which way did you go? what would be a sensible approach?
  - lukan 9mo ago
    I am currently in the process of finding out. LLM's did help with quickly researching dependencies unknown to me and investigating build errors, but ideally I want to set it up in a way, that the agent can work on its own, change -> try to build -> test it. Once that works half automated, I call it success.
- earino 9mo ago
  Two of the authors are engaging on bluesky regarding the "clickbaityness" of the paper: https://bsky.app/profile/gaborbekes.bsky.social/post/3md4rgavkyc22 https://bsky.app/profile/gaborbekes.bsky.social/post/3md4rga... (Note, I receive a thanks in the paper.)
tomaytotomato 9mo ago
I have been trying to use Claude code to help improve my opensource Java NLP location library. However trying to get it to do anything other than optimise code or fix small issues it struggles. It struggles with high level abstract issues. For example I currently have an issue with ambiguity collisions e.g. Input: "California" Output: "California, Missouri" California is a state but also city in Missouri - https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j/issues/44 https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j/issues/44 I asked Claude several times to resolve this ambiguity and it suggested various prioritisation strategies etc. however the resulting changes broke other functionality in my library. In the end I am redesigning my library from scratch with minimal AI input. Why? because I started the project without the help of AI a few years back, I designed it to solve a problem but that problem and nuanced programming decisions seem to not be respected by LLMs (LLMs dont care about the story, they just care about the current state of the code)
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  > I started the project in my brain and it has many flaws and nuances which I think LLMs are struggling to respect. The project, or your brain? I think this is what a lot of LLM coders run into - they have a lot of intrinsic knowledge that is difficult or takes a lot of time and effort to put into words and describe. Vibes, if you will, like "I can't explain it but this code looks wrong"
  - tomaytotomato 9mo ago
    I updated my original comment to explain my reasoning a bit more clearly. Essentially I ask an LLM to look at a project and it just sees the current state of the codebase, it doesn't see the iterations and hacks and refactors and reverts. It also doesn't see the first functionality I wrote for it at v1. This could indeed be solved by giving the LLM a git log and telling it a story, but that might not solve my issue?
    - alright2565 9mo ago
      I personally don't have any trouble with that. Using Sonnet 3.7 in Claude Code, I just ask it to spelunk the git history for a certain segment of the code if I think it will be meaningful for its task.
antirez 9mo ago
I believe we will see a new huge wave of useful open source software. However don't expect the development model to stay the same. I was finally able to resurrect a few projects of mine, and many more will come. One incredible thing was the ability to easily merge what was worth merging from forks, for instance. The new OSS will be driven not much by the amount of code you can produce, but from the idea of software you have, how the software should look like, behave, what it should do to be useful. Today design is more important than coding.
- koakuma-chan 9mo ago
  I don't trust software that has .claude in its GitHub repo.
  - echelon 9mo ago
    You won't have to ignore this stuff for long. Pretty soon it'll be mandatory to keep up. I've been a senior engineer doing large scale active-active, five nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily. These are well thought out systems with 20+ folks on design document reviews. Not all of the work falls into that category, though. There's so much plumbing and maintenance and wiring of new features and requirements. On that stuff, I'm getting ten times the amount of work done with AI than I was before. I could replace the juniors on my team with just myself if I needed to and still get all of our combined work done. Engineers using AI are going to replace anyone not using AI. In fact, now is the time to start a startup and "fire" all of these incumbent SaaS companies. You can make reasonable progress quickly and duplicate much of what many companies do without much effort. If you haven't tried this stuff, you need to. I'm not kidding. You will easily 10x your productivity. I'm not saying don't review your own code. Please do. But Claude emits reasonable Rust and Java and C++. It's not just for JavaScript toys anymore. - - - - - - - - - - - - Edit: Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening. I'm not lying about this. I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech. The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here, to us and to our career. And these models are quite usable for production code. I can point Claude to a Rust HTTP handler and say, "using this example [file path], write a new endpoint that handles video file uploads, extracts the metadata, creates a thumbnail, uploads them to the cloud storage, and creates the relevant database records." And it does it in a minute. I review the code. It's as if I had written it. Maybe a change here or there. Real production Rust code, 100 - 500 LOC, one shotted in one minute. It even installs the routes and understands the HTTP framework DSL. It even codegens Swagger API documentation and somehow understands the proc macro DSL that takes Rust five minutes to compile. This tech is wizardry. It's the sci fi stuff we dreamed of as kids. I don't get the sour opinions. The only thing to fear is big tech monopolozation. I suppose the other thing to worry about is what's going to happen to our cushy $400k salaries. But if you make yourself useful, I think it'll work out just fine. Perhaps more than fine if you're able to leverage this to get ahead and fire your employer. You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well. I'm not saying non-engineers will be able to do this. I'm saying engineers are well positioned to leverage this.
deleted 9mo ago
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cheema33 9mo ago
I am a huge proponent of using AI tools for software development. But until I see a vibe coded replacement for the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, gcc, git or Chromium, I am just going to disagree with this premise. If I am on a system without Python installed, I don't see Claude saying, oh, you don't need to download it, I'll write the Python interpreter for you.
- Quarrel 9mo ago
  > I am a huge proponent of using AI tools for software development. But until I see a vibe coded replacement for the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, gcc, git or Chromium, I am just going to disagree with this premise. Did you read it? It isn't saying that LLMs will replace major open source software components. It said that the "reward" for providing, maintaining and helping curate these OSS pieces; which is the ecosystem they exist in, just disappears if there is no community around it, just an LLM ingesting open source code and spitting out a solution good or bad. We've already seen curl buckle under the pressure, as their community minded, good conscious effort to give back to security reports, collapsed under the weight of slop. This is largely about extending that thesis to the entire ecosystem. No GH issues, no PRs, no interaction. No kudos on HN, no stars on github, no "cheers mate" as you pass them at a conference after they give a great talk. Where did you get that you needed to see a Linux kernel developed from AI tools, before you think the article's authors have a point?
  - volkercraig 9mo ago
    > This is largely about extending that thesis to the entire ecosystem. No GH issues, no PRs, no interaction. No kudos on HN, no stars on github, no "cheers mate" as you pass them at a conference after they give a great talk. Oh... so nothing's gonna change for me then...
  - cheema33 9mo ago
    > Where did you get that you needed to see a Linux kernel developed from AI tools.. It is in the title: "Vibe coding kills open source" Clickbait titles beget clickbait responses.
dizhn 9mo ago
I don't really read papers and haven't read this one either but that summary. > In vibe coding, an AI agent builds software by selecting and assembling open-source software (OSS), Are they talking about indirectly due to prior training of the model? No agent I use is selecting and assembling open source software. That's more of an integration type of job not software development. Are they talking about packages and libraries? If yes, that's exactly how most people use those too. I mean like this: > often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers. and then, > Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns. Maintainers who earn "returns" must be such a small niche as to be insignificant. Or do they mean things like github stars? > When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Now the hypothesis is exactly the opposite. Do agents not "select and assamble" OSS anymore? And what does this have to do with how OSS is "monetized"? > Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid. Sustaining OSS insofar as maintainers do it for a living requries major changes. Period. I don't see how vibe coding which makes all of this easier and cheaper is changing that equation. Quality is a different matter altogether and can still be achieved. I am seeing a bunch of disjointed claims taken as truth that I frankly do not agree with in the first place. What would the result of such a study even explain?
- korenmiklos 9mo ago
  Author here. By "returns" we mean any reward the developer is aiming for, whether money, recognition, world fame, future jobs, helping fellow developers. Sorry, econ jargon. AI agents can select and load the appropriate packages and libraries without the user even knowing the name of the library, let alone that of the developer. This reduces the visibility of developers among users, who are now less likely to give a star, sponsor, offer a job, recommend the library to others etc. Even as a business user, say an agency building websites, I could have been a fedn of certain js frameworks, hosting meetups, buying swags, sponsoring development. I am less likely to do that if I have no idea what framework is powering the websites I build. Our argument is that rewards fall faster with vibe coding than productivity increases. OSS developers lose motivation, they stop maintaining existing libraries, don't bother sharing new ones (even if they keep writing a lot of code for themselves).
WarmWash 9mo ago
Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?
- skybrian 9mo ago
  Maybe true for some apps, but I suspect we will still have a vibrant ecosystem of package managers and open source libraries and coding agents will know how to use them.
  - marginalia_nu 9mo ago
    What would be the point of that? If LLMs ever actually become competent, surely they can just implement what they need.
    - wongarsu 9mo ago
      The same reason why they exist now. Why spend millions of tokens on designing, implementing and debugging something, followed by years of discovering edge cases in the real world, if I can just use a library that already did all of that Sure, leftpad and python-openai aren't hugely valuable in the age of LLMs, but redis and ffmpeg are still as useful as ever. Probably even more useful now that LLMs can actually know and use all their obscure features
      - storystarling 9mo ago
        They know the syntax but seem to miss the architectural context. I've found that models will happily generate valid Redis commands that introduce race conditions or break state consistency the moment you have concurrency. It saves typing but you still need to design the locking strategy yourself.
- reactordev 9mo ago
DarkSource 9mo ago
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p0nce 9mo ago
It is effective but once cost of creating something is down, then you have less reason to collaborate and depend on each other vs asking your own LLM to build your own bubble. When paired with new-found cognitive laziness and lack of motivation when you then use no AI it's not sure of the second order effects.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  >then you have less reason to collaborate and depend on each other vs asking your own LLM to build your own bubble What's interesting in reading comments like this is reading the same type of message across a bunch of different fields and aspects of life. "When continents move, not only the weather changes" If GenAI keeps increasing it's abilities and doesn't bankrupt a number of companies first, I think it's going to make a lot of people bubbles that encompass their entire lives. It's not difficult to imagine little pockets of hyperreality were some peoples lives are only feed by generated content and their existence starts to behave more like a video game than having any grounding in the physical. It's going to be interesting what the fractured remains of society look like in that future.
nicoburns 9mo ago
Something I've noticed is that AI code generation makes it easier/faster to generate code while shifting more work of the work of keeping code correct and maintainable to the code review stage. That can be highly problematic for open source projects that are typically already bottlenecked by maintainer review bandwidth. It can be mitigated by PR submitters doing a review and edit pass prior to submitting a PR. But a lot of submitters don't currently do this, and in my experience the average quality of PRs generated by AI is definitely significantly lower than those not generated by AI.
- echelon 9mo ago
  The maintainers can now do all the work themselves. With the time they save using AI, they can get much more work done. So much that having other engineers learn the codebase is probably not worth it anymore. Large scale software systems can be maintained by one or two folks now. Edit: I'm not going to get rate limited replying to everyone, so I'll just link another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765785
  - shafyy 9mo ago
    Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not?
  - wooderson_iv 9mo ago
    Do you have anecdotes or evidence of this or is it speculative?
  - j16sdiz 9mo ago
    Those are the most mentally exhausting task. Are you sure putting this burden on single person is good?
  - tracker1 9mo ago
    No, because proper QA/QC will be the bottleneck.... AI is ill-suited to test for fit/use. I built an ANSi terminal with AI assist (rust/wasm/canvas)... it literally took longer to get the scrollback feature working with keyboard and mousewheel interactions than it took to get the basic rendering correct. And there are still a few bugs in it. In the end, you should not just skip QA/QC and fitness testing. Many things can fit a technical spec and still be absolutely horrible. With AI assisted developmnet, imo it's that much more important to get the UX right. I don't want 10x the apps if they're all half-implemented garbage that look like garbage are hard to use and just painful to install, maintain and use. Library creation still has a place here... and so far, getting AI code assistants to actually understand and use a given library that may be less popular has been at the very least, interresting.
maximgeorge 9mo ago
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gyanchawdhary 9mo ago
interesting as an econ thought experiment .. but it assumes OSS revenue comes from direct developr engagement .. In practice .. most successful OSS is funded by enterprises .. cloud vendors .. or consulting engagements .. where broader adoption, including AI mediated usage, often increases demand of said OSS project
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neko-kai 9mo ago
On the contrary, I hope vibe coding revives Linux desktop into a truly usable platform. e.g. Vibe coding defeats GNOME developers' main argument for endlessly deleting features and degrading user experience - that features are ostensibly "hard to maintain". Well, LLMs are rapidly reducing development costs to 0. The bottleneck for UI development is now testing, and here desktop Linux has advantage - Linux users have been trained like Pavlov's dogs to test and write detailed upstream bug reports, something Windows and macOS users just don't do.
- croes 9mo ago
  You don't think the current prices of LLMs will stay? At some point the investors want to see profit.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  Is the maintenance due to code or due to people / politics / etc? LLMs won't change that. Also it's a formal system and process, "vibe" coding is anything but. Call me curmudgeony (?) but I don't think "vibe coding" should be a phrase used to describe LLM assisted software engineering in large / critical systems.
- rvz 9mo ago
  > On the contrary, I hope vibe coding revives Linux desktop into a truly usable platform. Oh sweet summer child. > Well, LLMs are rapidly reducing development costs to 0. And maintainance costs along with technical debt rapidly goes up.
ipaddr 9mo ago
For me spending time on my open source projects doesn't make sense anymore. People (the community and employers) previously were impressed because of the amount of work required. Now that respect is gone as people can't automatically tell on the surface if this is a low effort vibe code or something else. Community engagement has dropped. Stars aren't being given out as freely. People aren't actively reading your code like they use to. For projects done before llms you can still link effort and signal but for anything started now.. everyone assumes it's llm created. No one want to read that code and not in the same way you would read other humans. Fewer will download the project. Many of the reasons why I wrote open source is gone. And knowing the biggest/only engagement will come from llms copying your work giving you no credit.. what's the point?
- Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
  But effort / amount of work shouldn't be a deciding factor - I think anyone can churn out code if they choose to. But it's the type and quality of it. Nobody cares if you wrote 5000 LOC, what they care about is what it does, how it does it, how fast and how good it does it, and none of those qualifiers are about volume.
- 9dev 9mo ago
  Eh, I don't believe that. Smartphones have amazing cameras, and we still have photographers. There are CNC saws and mills that will ship you your perfectly realised CAD prints, yet there are still carpenters and a vibrant community of people making their own furniture. These examples go on and on. Without any kind of offence implied: As maintainer of a few open source projects, I'm happy if it stops being an employability optimisation vector. Many of the people who don't code for fun but to get hired by FAANG aren't really bringing joy to others anyway. If we end up with a small web of enthusiasts who write software for solving challenges, connecting intellectually with likeminded people, and altruism—then I'm fine with that. Let companies pay for writing software! Reduce the giant dependency chains! Have less infrastructure dedicated to distributing all that open source code! What will remain after that is the actual open source code true to the idea.
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contravariant 9mo ago
I'm never quite sure what to think of papers that have a conclusion and then build a mathematical model to support it.
- tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
  Science starts with hypothesis and predictions.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    Yes, but it's easy, and incorrect, to start with an answer and build your work backwards rather than proving your hypothesis with evidence.
marginalia_nu 9mo ago
> When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid. I can't think of even a single example of OSS being monetized through direct user engagement. The bulk of it just isn't monetized at all, and what is monetized (beyond like a tip jar situation where you get some coffee money every once in a while) is primarily sponsored by enterprise users, support license sales, or through grants, or something like that. A few projects like Krita sell binaries on the steam store.
- nprateem 9mo ago
  Terraform, ansible, countless others. No community=no enterprise version, no awareness
- dfox 9mo ago
  There is this kind of webdev-adjacent niche where the model of using documentation (or even intentionally sub-par documentation) as a marketing funnel for consulting and/or "Pro" versions is a thing. These projects are somewhat vocal about vibe coding killing their business models. If these projects really create any meaningful value is another question.
- WorldMaker 9mo ago
  > what is monetized (beyond like a tip jar situation where you get some coffee money every once in a while) is primarily sponsored by enterprise users, support license sales, or through grants, or something like that All of those examples are the "direct user engagement" in question. No one tips a tip jar that they don't see. Enterprise users don't sponsor projects or buy licenses when they don't know they are using projects they should sponsor or buy a better license. If an LLM is automating your `npm install` you probably don't see the funding requests. Are you running `npm fund` in your spare time? If an LLM is automating your need to lookup library documentation you probably don't see that the library's own documentation has a Ko-Fi link or GitHub Sponsors request. Would you check library websites and GitHub repos on your own for such things without the need to read their documentation?
BoredPositron 9mo ago
I have written so many small scripts and apps that do exactly what I want. The general purpose OSS projects are always a compromise. I believe if LLMs mature some more years we will see a decline in these general purpose projects and will see a rise in personal apps. I dont think its something to worry about.
tinyhouse 9mo ago
There's a balance between coding by hand and vibe coding that is important. The less you understand the code, the more boring maintaining the software becomes. It's OK for throw away code, but not for serious open source projects. Use it as a powerful tool rather than your replacement.
rtp4me 9mo ago
I wonder how many OSS projects are using AI to actively squash bugs so their projects are more rock-solid than before. Also, seems to me if your project underwent a full AI standardized code-quality check (using 2 or 3 AI models), it would be considered the "standard" from which other projects could use. For example, if you needed a particular piece of code for your own project, the AI tooling could suggest leveraging an existing gold-standard project.
sailfast 9mo ago
It _might_ kill open source. It might lower revenue opportunities according to this abstract. Bit of a click-bait paper title.
OrvalWintermute 9mo ago
maybe we just need License-Aware Vibe Coding that can link back to code snippet provenance similar to SBOMs?
bluejay2387 9mo ago
Does it seem to anyone else that author's have created a definition for 'vibe coding' that is specifically designed to justify their paper? Also that their premise is based on the assumption that developers will be irresponsible about the use of these tools ("often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers") so that it would actually be people killing open source not 'Vibe Coding'? Just a guess on my part, but once developers learn to use these tools and we get over the newness I think this will be great for open source. With these tools open source projects can compete with an army of corporate developers while alleviating some of the pressure on overworked under-rewarded maintainers.
- korenmiklos 9mo ago
  Author here. We have the productvity-increasing effect of AI coding agents in the model (you're right, we're using "vibe coding" as a catch-all here). Our claim is that rewards to OSS developers (visibility and recognition in the dev community, future sponsorships, upsells to business users etc) fall faster than productivity increases. OSS devs lose the incentives to create software for others and respond to their needs.
j4coh 9mo ago
I am not sure if it kills open source, but it probably kills open core. You can just take a project like GitLab and ask an LLM, conveniently trained on the GitLab enterprise edition source code, to generate you a fresh copy of whatever features of EE you care about, but with the license laundered.
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delegate 9mo ago
There's some irony in the fact that LLMs are in large part possible because of open source software. From the tools which were used to design and develop the models (programming languages, libraries) to the operating systems running them to the databases used for storing training data .. plus of course they were trained mostly on open source code. If OSS didn't exist, it's highly unlikely that LLMs would have been built.
- blibble 9mo ago
  > If OSS didn't exist, it's highly unlikely that LLMs would have been built. would anyone want SlopHub Copilot if it had been trained exclusively on Microsoft's code? (rhetorical question)
- jdiff 9mo ago
  Turns out that it's only in myth that a snake can eat its own tail without dying.
verdverm 9mo ago
This study seems flawed at the assumptions and from the start "most" maintainers make exactly zero dollars. Further, OSS monetization rarely involves developer engagement, it's been all about enterprise feature gating
alentred 9mo ago
Not an answer to all of our problems, but I wonder if we will see a wider adoption of more complex contribution models. Like "Lieutenants Workflow" Linux was known for, for example. Many possible workflows are explored in the Git Book [1]. [1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-Workflows https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-W...
pmarreck 9mo ago
Related but not sure how much attention it's getting: GPL is a dead man walking since you can have any LLM cleanroom a new implementation in a new language from a public spec with verifiable "never looked at the original source" and it can be more permissively-licensed however you wish (MIT, BSD etc). case in point, check out my current deps on the project I'm currently working on with LLM assist: https://github.com/pmarreck/validate/tree/yolo/deps https://github.com/pmarreck/validate/tree/yolo/deps "validate" is a project that currently validates over 100 file formats at the byte level; its goal is to validate as many formats as possible, for posterity/all time. Why did I avoid GPL (which I am normally a fan of) since this is open-source? I have an even-higher-level project I'm working on, implementing automatic light parity protection (which can proactively repair data without a RAID/ZFS setup) which I want to make for sale, whose code will (initially) be private, and which uses this as a dependency (no sense in protecting data that is already corrupted). Figured I'd give this to the world for free in the meantime. It's already found a bunch of actually-corrupt files in my collection (note that there's still some false-positive risk; I literally released this just yesterday and it's still actively being worked on) including some cherished photos from a Japan trip I took a few years ago that cannot be replaced. It has Mac, Windows and Linux builds. Check the github actions page.
- natebc 9mo ago
  Did something change? Is LLM generated stuff now able to be protected with copyrights? I was under the impression that copyright was only available for works created by people.
  - pmarreck 9mo ago
    Copyright has never required the absence of tools, only the presence of human creative agency. LLMs don’t change that. They’re just tools. The relevant question is whether a human exercised creative judgment in selecting, shaping, or editing the output. Which I most certainly did. Otherwise my month of work here would have just been a minute and a single prompt and then just grabbing a coffee. We already handle this with cameras, compilers, spell-checkers, and procedural generation. If you push a button and accept whatever falls out, you may not have authorship. If you meaningfully direct and curate the result, you almost certainly do. Responsibility still lands on the human, which is a good sanity check: there is no such thing as “LLM-authored but human-unaccountable” work. Pretending otherwise is just outsourcing epistemic responsibility to a stochastic tool. Similarly, you can't both assign blame to me when things go wrong, but credit to the LLM when things go right. Or vice versa.
donatj 9mo ago
As the maintainer of a handful of small projects, what I have seen for better or worse is tickets and pull requests completely dry up. My guess is instead of Googling "library that does X" people are asking AI to solve the problem and it's regurgitating a solution in place? That's my theory anyway.
Olshansky 9mo ago
Yes and no. --- Concrete example of a no: I set up [1] in such a way that anyone can implement a new blog -> rss feed; docs, agents.md, open-source, free, etc... Concrete example of a yes: Company spends too much money on simple software. --- Our Vision --- I feel the need to share: https://grove.city/ https://grove.city/ Human Flywheel: Human tips creator <-> Creator engages with audience Agent Flywheel: Human creates creative content <-> Agent tips human Yes, it uses crypto, but it's just stablecoins. This is going to exist in some fashion and all online content creation (OSS and other) will need it. --- As with everything, it Obvious [1] https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds
Sevii 9mo ago
Vibecoding is great for open source. Open source is already dominated by strong solo programmers like antirez, linus, etc. People with very strong motivations to create software they see as necessary. Vibecoding makes creating open source projects easier. It makes it easier to get from an idea to "Hey guys check this out!" The only downside to open source is the fly by PRs vibecoding enables which are currently draining maintainer time.
- progx 9mo ago
  And make one PR after another, i can see how happy Linus & Co. would be of all the garbage features ;-)
- tracker1 9mo ago
  I think the solution to the latter is simply to maintain high standards in terms of structure and organization. I've always been a fan of KISS should override any other non-requirement of software. Any my non-requirement, I mean anything that is just subjective. Don't create complexity you don't actually need, or that doesn't make an outsized contribution to making other areas of the code easier to reason with. Sometimes having dozens of one-off scripts is easier/simpler than trying to create the uber-flexibly one tool does all solution.
program_whiz 9mo ago
All this talk about how you can vibecode all your apps now, "why use OSS?" is making me laugh. Sure for a little website or a small tool, maybe even a change to your somewhat complex codebase that you thoroughly check and test. Is anyone replacing firefox, chromium, postgres, nginx, git, linux, etc? It would be idiotic to trade git for a vibe coded source control. I can't even imagine the motivations, maybe "merges the way I like it"? Not sure, but anyone who's saying this stuff hasn't even taken the basic first level glance at what it would entail. By all means, stop paying $10 a month to "JSON validator SaSS", but also don't complain with the little niggling bugs, maintenance and organization that comes with it. But please stop pretending you can just vibe code your own Kafka, Apache, Vulkan, or PostGRES. Yes, you can probably go faster (possibly not in the right direction if inexperienced), but ultimately, something like that would still require very senior, experienced person, using the tool in a very guided way with heavy review. By why take on the maintenance, the bug hunting, and everything else, unless that is your main business objective? Even if you can 10x, if you use that to just take on 10x more maintenance, you haven't increased velocity. To really go faster, that 10x must be focused on the right objective -- distinctive business value. If you use that 10x to generate hundreds of small tools you now have to juggle and maintain, that have no docs or support, no searchable history of problems solved, you may have returned yourself to 1x (or worse). This is the old "we'll write our own inhouse programming language" but leaking out to apps. Sure, java doesn't work _exactly_ the way you want it to, you probably have complaints. But writing your own lang will be a huge hit to whatever it was you actually wanted to use the language for, and you lose all the docs, forums, LSP / debugging tools, ecosystem, etc.
barelysapient 9mo ago
I think LLMs also kill off most programming languages. I think we’ll end up with a handful of languages that LLMs most proficient at writing for and the languages required for device or processor compatibility. The cost improvement for an LLM to emit a feature (with an engineer in the loop) is too much of an improvement. We’ll look at engineers coding in C the same way we look at engineers today who code in assembly. LLM enabled development becomes the new abstraction; probably with a grammar and system for stronger specification formalization.
- delaminator 9mo ago
  I've done a bit of experimentation with that. And the irony is Rust seems to fare best because of the error messages of the compiler. I have had a lot of conversations with Claude about it and it supports that theory.
  - 13rac1 9mo ago
    Warning: Claude may support the theory, because Claude is a sycophant.
    - delaminator 9mo ago
      I have a well-calibrated ego.
      - recursive 9mo ago
        You're absolutely right.
  - hxugufjfjf 9mo ago
    Claude told me the exact opposite. Always claims that Python or JavaScript is the best choice because its training corpus is so much larger than the alternatives.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
ozten 9mo ago
Generative AI is a major setback to OSS licensing. I've been on projects where we needed to do a "cleanroom" implementation and vet the team has never viewed the source code of competing products. Now in the gen AI era, coding agents are IP laundering machines. They are trained on OSS code, but the nuances of the original licenses are lost. On the whole, I think it is a net gain for civilization, but if we zoom into OSS licensing... not good.
- kode-targz 9mo ago
  It could be a net gain for civilization if it stayed open, decentralized and off the hands of private companies, but that's not at all the case. Only tecchies care or even know about open models
  - ozten 9mo ago
    Regardless of open or closed models, the reason it is a net gain is that the cost of software production is collapsing and will trend towards zero. Example: We can achieve more climate solutions (and faster) thanks to technological acceleration.
    - tracker1 9mo ago
      We just need to consume 1.21gwatts of electricity, and then we can invest in nuclear power in the past.
  - finaard 9mo ago
    LLMs can be quite useful in reverse engineering - there's typically a lot of steps which are not really difficult, but are hard to script, and still require a bit of an idea what's going on. Quite a bit of that can be automated with LLMs now - so it's also a lot easier now to figure what your proprietary blob does, and either interface with it, or just publish an implementation of the functionality as open source, potentially messing with your business plan.
- tracker1 9mo ago
  Probably fair... would also be interesting to try to limit the use of say GPL code to maintaining interoperability, not duplication of internal methods, etc. I also think that the amount of MIT/ISC/BSD, etc. licensed code, with whatever MS and other commercial entities have contributed for this use is probably enough to not be a significant difference to model quality though.
dev_l1x_be 9mo ago
I think it is not killing opensource. It is changing it. There are more smaller scoped projects created for specific purposes instead of creating a huge project that has gazillion features supporting everything. At least this is my experience.
- tracker1 9mo ago
  Largely my take as well.. there's also a LOT of slop and not enough polish or completeness in terms of UX and usability.
tracker1 9mo ago
I reject the assertion that AI Vibe Coding has to have any affect on how OSS maintainers get paid (or not). Most of those that are paid, are paid because their job is related but the OSS library/project itself is not directly monetized. I don't see AI/Vibe coding changing this... except that now the maintainer can choose or not to accept or use those tools on their project or not. But the assertion that everything needs to change is absurd. Articles like this are similar in my mind to arguments for communism because every artist deserves a living wage... that's just not how society can sustain itself in reality. Maybe in a world without scarcity, but I don't see scarcity going away any time soon.
sanskritical 9mo ago
Open source software, by the admission of this article, is a critical input to AI agents useful for code generation. So the way I see it is that there is now an entire industry that is incentivized to financially support open source software for entirely new reasons. To keep the models trained on new languages, libraries, and developments in computer science, they need to make sure that high quality modern code is still freely available, forever. Vibe coding eventually creates more value for FOSS, not less.
- reustle 9mo ago
  There is a reasonable argument that there won’t be many new languages now that models are sufficiently trained. If anything, we may see languages optimized for models and not humans.
- gegtik 9mo ago
  Seems you are arguing that The Tragedy Of The Commons could never happen because people benefit from the Commons
mellosouls 9mo ago
Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid A recent discussion on a related topic, apparently following the same misguided idea of how OSS is motivated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565281 (All my new code will be closed-source from now on: 93 points, 112 comments)
matkoniecz 9mo ago
from abstract > When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement (...) Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid. so it applies to narrow slice of OSS
devinprater 9mo ago
I'm completely blind. I like Linux. I've started to love Android since getting a Samsung and getting rid of OnePlus, cause accessibility. Termux is cool, but it's accessibility wasn't. So, I had Gemini rangle it up a bit into my fork of Termux [1] Now it reads (usually) only newly incoming text, I can feel around the screen to read a line at a time, and cursor tracking works well enough. Then I got Emacs and Emacspeak working, having Gemini build DecTalk (TTS engine) for Termux and get the Emacspeak DecTalk speech server working with that. I'm still amazed that, with a Bluetooth keyboard, I have Linux, and Emacs, in my pocket. I can write Org and Markdown, read EPUB books in Emacs with Nov.el, look at an actual calendar not just a list of events, and even use Gemini CLI and Claude Code, all on my phone! This is proof that phones, with enough freedom, can be workstations. If I can get Orca working on a desktop environment in Termux-GUI. But even with just Emacs and the shell, I can do quite a bit. Then I decided to go wild and make an MUD client for Emacs/Emacspeak, since accessible ones for Android are limited, and I didn't trust my hacks to Termux to handle Tintin++ very well. So, Emacs with Emacspeak it was, and Elmud [2] was born. Elmud has a few cool features. First of all, since Emacspeak has voice-lock, like font-lock but for TTS, Ansi colors can be "heard", like red being a deeper voice. Also a few MUD clients have sound packs on Windows, which make them sound more like a modern video game, while still being text-based. I got a few of those working with Elmud. You just load one of the supported MUD's, and the sound pack is downloaded and installed for you. It's easy and simple. And honestly, that's what I want my tools to provide, something I, or anyone else who chooses to use them, that is easy to get the most out of. None of this would have been possible without AI. None of it would have been done. It would have remained a dream. And yes, it was all vibe-coded, mostly with Codex 5.2 on high thinking. And yes, the code may look awful. But honestly, how many closed-source programs look just as bad or even worse under the covers of compilation? [1] https://github.com/devinprater/Talking-termux-app https://github.com/devinprater/Talking-termux-app [2] https://github.com/devinprater/elmud https://github.com/devinprater/elmud
chfritz 9mo ago
AI is poisoning the well from which it drinks. If OSS withers or dies, what will AI train on to get better? Same with StackOverflow.
wessorh 9mo ago
I think corporate cloud killed opensource, AI is simply a nail in its coffin. OpenAI's recent announcement did more for software patents than anyone could have ever done when they floated thy own of your ideas.
wessorh 9mo ago
I think corporate cloud killed opensource, AI is simply a nail in its coffin. OpenAI's recent announcement did more for software patents than anyone could have ever done when they floated they own of your ideas.
geldedus 9mo ago
Just stop calling AI-assisted coding "vibe coding"
tug2024 9mo ago
[dead]
grimmzoww 9mo ago
Looking for solo devs testing AI continuation tool which i have built and need honest feedback if it is usefull or garbage if you are intersted in checking out - DM me
phendrenad2 9mo ago
"kills" is a strong word. The phenomenon of single-purpose self-service apps is not to be ignored, and we'll likely see people not only do that, but create apps for friends and family, leading to everyone having an "app guy" who makes apps for them, the same way many people have a "car guy" who can diagnose car problems before they need to take it to the shop,.. but open-source still has a place in high-complexity products where a very small number of people have the requisite knowledge to vibe-code it. E.G. don't expect people to be vibe-coding their own Unix kernels any time soon!

330 points by kgwgk 9mo ago

Is arxiv.org the new medium.com now? Seems like recently there has been a plethora of blog-level submissions from there to HN recently.

ktallett 9mo ago

I think vibe coding would greatly struggle with large open source projects unless your planning was exceptional and your comments on optimal coding style was exceptional, however...... For those small open source tools that many of us use daily and find invaluable, I actually think vibe coding is ideal for that. It can make a functional version quickly and you can iterate and improve it, and feel no loss for making it free to use. I was very sceptical but I will admit I think vibe coding has a place in society, just what it is yet is still to be determined. It can't help most for sure but it can help some in some situations.

Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
> For those small open source tools that many of us use daily and find invaluable, I actually think vibe coding is ideal for that. If they don't exist, AND the author is comitted to maintaining them instead of just putting it online, sure. But one issue I see is that a lot of these tools you describe already exist, so creating another one (using code assist tools or otherwise) just adds noise IMO. The better choice is to research and plan (as you say in your first sentence) before comitting resources. The barrier to "NIH" is lowered through code assistants, which risks reducing collaboration in open source land in favor of "I'll just write my own". Granted, "I'll write my own" has always felt like it has a lower barrier to entry than "I'm going to search for this tool and learn to use it".
cess11 9mo ago
The authors try to study the effect of people not engaging directly with OSS projects because they substitute for this with a gang of chatbots, and draw the conclusion that this lack of contact with actual people means they'll be less likely to help finance OSS development.
data-ottawa 9mo ago
There are three or four projects I've always wanted to do, but were frontloaded with a lot of complexity and drudgery. Maybe the best feature of vibe coding is that it makes the regret factor of poor early choices much lower. Its kind of magic to go "you know what, I was wrong, let's try this approach instead" and not having to spend huge amounts of time fixing things or rewriting 80% of the project. It's made it a lot more fun to try building big projects on my own, where I would go into decision paralysis or prematurely optimize and never start the meat or learning of the core project. Its also been nice to have agents review my projects for major issues, so I feel more confident sharing them.
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  > go into decision paralysis or prematurely optimize Setting out to implement a feature only to immediately get bogged down in details that I could probably get away with glossing over. LLMs short circuit that by just spitting something out immediately. Of course it's of questionable quality, but once you get something working you can always come back and improve it.
hayd 9mo ago
I think one of the things that will need to be embraced is carefully curating .md context files to give the prompts better/shared direction to contributors. Things like any new feature or fix should include a test case (in the right place), functions should re-use existing library code wherever possible, function signatures should never change in a backwards-incompatible way, any code changes should pass the linter, etc etc. And ideally ensure the agent writes code that's going to be to the maintainer's "taste". I haven't worked out how to do this for my own projects. Once you've set it up it's not too hard to imagine an AI giving an initial PR assessment... to discard the worst AI slop, offer some stylistic feedback, or suggest performance concerns.

Sharlin 9mo ago

No problem! Just give the agents the ability to autonomously report issues, submit patches, and engage with library authors. Surely nothing can go wrong.

tosh 9mo ago

generative ai increases ambition, lowers barriers more open source, better open source perhaps also more forking (not only absolute but also relative) contribution dynamics are also changing I'm fairly optimistic that generative ai is good for open source and the commons what I'm also seeing is open source projects that had not so great ergonomics or user interfaces in general are now getting better thanks to generative ai this might be the most directly noticeable change for users of niche open source

avaer 9mo ago
What do you think of the paper's research claims that the returns for maintainers are reduced and sharing is decreasing?
- positron26 9mo ago
  Without real finance model innovation, what returns?
  - avaer 9mo ago
    The same kind of returns that power research academia, where the amount of money you make is determined by the number of citations on your papers. Except it's on Github and it's forks and starts.
  - mr_spothawk 9mo ago
    I upvoted your comment. Also, it's a scarcity mindset. I don't agree that sibling to my comment: "make money by getting papers cited". it is not a long-term solution, much as Ad revenue is broken model for free software, also. I'm hopeful that we see some vibe-coders get some products out that make money, and then pay to support the system they rely on for creating/maintaining their code. Not sure what else to hope for, in terms of maintaining the public goods.
    - positron26 9mo ago
      Any "exposure" economy has real money somewhere else turning the wheel. If that money isn't sensitive to healthy signal, neither is the downstream. Well-wishers are just alternative perpetual motion machine enthusiasts.

lukan 9mo ago

"Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns." I think the title is clickbait. The conclusion is: "Vibe coding represents a fundamental shift in how software is produced and consumed. The productivity gains are real and large. But so is the threat to the open source ecosystem that underpins modern software infrastructure. The model shows that these gains and threats are not independent: the same technology that lowers costs also erodes the engagement that sustains voluntary contribution." The dangers I see rather in projects drowning in LLM slop PR's, instead of less engagement. And the benefits of LLMs to open source in lowering the cost to revive and maintain (abandoned) projects.

positron26 9mo ago
What even is "engagement" here? Seems like abstract harm that rationalizes whatever emotion the reader already feels.
wolfi1 9mo ago
do you have experience in reviving an abandoned project? which way did you go? what would be a sensible approach?
- lukan 9mo ago
  I am currently in the process of finding out. LLM's did help with quickly researching dependencies unknown to me and investigating build errors, but ideally I want to set it up in a way, that the agent can work on its own, change -> try to build -> test it. Once that works half automated, I call it success.
earino 9mo ago
Two of the authors are engaging on bluesky regarding the "clickbaityness" of the paper: https://bsky.app/profile/gaborbekes.bsky.social/post/3md4rgavkyc22 https://bsky.app/profile/gaborbekes.bsky.social/post/3md4rga... (Note, I receive a thanks in the paper.)

tomaytotomato 9mo ago

I have been trying to use Claude code to help improve my opensource Java NLP location library. However trying to get it to do anything other than optimise code or fix small issues it struggles. It struggles with high level abstract issues. For example I currently have an issue with ambiguity collisions e.g. Input: "California" Output: "California, Missouri" California is a state but also city in Missouri - https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j/issues/44 https://github.com/tomaytotomato/location4j/issues/44 I asked Claude several times to resolve this ambiguity and it suggested various prioritisation strategies etc. however the resulting changes broke other functionality in my library. In the end I am redesigning my library from scratch with minimal AI input. Why? because I started the project without the help of AI a few years back, I designed it to solve a problem but that problem and nuanced programming decisions seem to not be respected by LLMs (LLMs dont care about the story, they just care about the current state of the code)

Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
> I started the project in my brain and it has many flaws and nuances which I think LLMs are struggling to respect. The project, or your brain? I think this is what a lot of LLM coders run into - they have a lot of intrinsic knowledge that is difficult or takes a lot of time and effort to put into words and describe. Vibes, if you will, like "I can't explain it but this code looks wrong"
- tomaytotomato 9mo ago
  I updated my original comment to explain my reasoning a bit more clearly. Essentially I ask an LLM to look at a project and it just sees the current state of the codebase, it doesn't see the iterations and hacks and refactors and reverts. It also doesn't see the first functionality I wrote for it at v1. This could indeed be solved by giving the LLM a git log and telling it a story, but that might not solve my issue?
  - alright2565 9mo ago
    I personally don't have any trouble with that. Using Sonnet 3.7 in Claude Code, I just ask it to spelunk the git history for a certain segment of the code if I think it will be meaningful for its task.

antirez 9mo ago

I believe we will see a new huge wave of useful open source software. However don't expect the development model to stay the same. I was finally able to resurrect a few projects of mine, and many more will come. One incredible thing was the ability to easily merge what was worth merging from forks, for instance. The new OSS will be driven not much by the amount of code you can produce, but from the idea of software you have, how the software should look like, behave, what it should do to be useful. Today design is more important than coding.

koakuma-chan 9mo ago
I don't trust software that has .claude in its GitHub repo.
- echelon 9mo ago
  You won't have to ignore this stuff for long. Pretty soon it'll be mandatory to keep up. I've been a senior engineer doing large scale active-active, five nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily. These are well thought out systems with 20+ folks on design document reviews. Not all of the work falls into that category, though. There's so much plumbing and maintenance and wiring of new features and requirements. On that stuff, I'm getting ten times the amount of work done with AI than I was before. I could replace the juniors on my team with just myself if I needed to and still get all of our combined work done. Engineers using AI are going to replace anyone not using AI. In fact, now is the time to start a startup and "fire" all of these incumbent SaaS companies. You can make reasonable progress quickly and duplicate much of what many companies do without much effort. If you haven't tried this stuff, you need to. I'm not kidding. You will easily 10x your productivity. I'm not saying don't review your own code. Please do. But Claude emits reasonable Rust and Java and C++. It's not just for JavaScript toys anymore. - - - - - - - - - - - - Edit: Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening. I'm not lying about this. I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech. The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here, to us and to our career. And these models are quite usable for production code. I can point Claude to a Rust HTTP handler and say, "using this example [file path], write a new endpoint that handles video file uploads, extracts the metadata, creates a thumbnail, uploads them to the cloud storage, and creates the relevant database records." And it does it in a minute. I review the code. It's as if I had written it. Maybe a change here or there. Real production Rust code, 100 - 500 LOC, one shotted in one minute. It even installs the routes and understands the HTTP framework DSL. It even codegens Swagger API documentation and somehow understands the proc macro DSL that takes Rust five minutes to compile. This tech is wizardry. It's the sci fi stuff we dreamed of as kids. I don't get the sour opinions. The only thing to fear is big tech monopolozation. I suppose the other thing to worry about is what's going to happen to our cushy $400k salaries. But if you make yourself useful, I think it'll work out just fine. Perhaps more than fine if you're able to leverage this to get ahead and fire your employer. You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well. I'm not saying non-engineers will be able to do this. I'm saying engineers are well positioned to leverage this.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

cheema33 9mo ago

I am a huge proponent of using AI tools for software development. But until I see a vibe coded replacement for the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, gcc, git or Chromium, I am just going to disagree with this premise. If I am on a system without Python installed, I don't see Claude saying, oh, you don't need to download it, I'll write the Python interpreter for you.

Quarrel 9mo ago
> I am a huge proponent of using AI tools for software development. But until I see a vibe coded replacement for the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, gcc, git or Chromium, I am just going to disagree with this premise. Did you read it? It isn't saying that LLMs will replace major open source software components. It said that the "reward" for providing, maintaining and helping curate these OSS pieces; which is the ecosystem they exist in, just disappears if there is no community around it, just an LLM ingesting open source code and spitting out a solution good or bad. We've already seen curl buckle under the pressure, as their community minded, good conscious effort to give back to security reports, collapsed under the weight of slop. This is largely about extending that thesis to the entire ecosystem. No GH issues, no PRs, no interaction. No kudos on HN, no stars on github, no "cheers mate" as you pass them at a conference after they give a great talk. Where did you get that you needed to see a Linux kernel developed from AI tools, before you think the article's authors have a point?
- volkercraig 9mo ago
  > This is largely about extending that thesis to the entire ecosystem. No GH issues, no PRs, no interaction. No kudos on HN, no stars on github, no "cheers mate" as you pass them at a conference after they give a great talk. Oh... so nothing's gonna change for me then...
- cheema33 9mo ago
  > Where did you get that you needed to see a Linux kernel developed from AI tools.. It is in the title: "Vibe coding kills open source" Clickbait titles beget clickbait responses.

dizhn 9mo ago

I don't really read papers and haven't read this one either but that summary. > In vibe coding, an AI agent builds software by selecting and assembling open-source software (OSS), Are they talking about indirectly due to prior training of the model? No agent I use is selecting and assembling open source software. That's more of an integration type of job not software development. Are they talking about packages and libraries? If yes, that's exactly how most people use those too. I mean like this: > often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers. and then, > Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns. Maintainers who earn "returns" must be such a small niche as to be insignificant. Or do they mean things like github stars? > When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Now the hypothesis is exactly the opposite. Do agents not "select and assamble" OSS anymore? And what does this have to do with how OSS is "monetized"? > Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid. Sustaining OSS insofar as maintainers do it for a living requries major changes. Period. I don't see how vibe coding which makes all of this easier and cheaper is changing that equation. Quality is a different matter altogether and can still be achieved. I am seeing a bunch of disjointed claims taken as truth that I frankly do not agree with in the first place. What would the result of such a study even explain?

korenmiklos 9mo ago
Author here. By "returns" we mean any reward the developer is aiming for, whether money, recognition, world fame, future jobs, helping fellow developers. Sorry, econ jargon. AI agents can select and load the appropriate packages and libraries without the user even knowing the name of the library, let alone that of the developer. This reduces the visibility of developers among users, who are now less likely to give a star, sponsor, offer a job, recommend the library to others etc. Even as a business user, say an agency building websites, I could have been a fedn of certain js frameworks, hosting meetups, buying swags, sponsoring development. I am less likely to do that if I have no idea what framework is powering the websites I build. Our argument is that rewards fall faster with vibe coding than productivity increases. OSS developers lose motivation, they stop maintaining existing libraries, don't bother sharing new ones (even if they keep writing a lot of code for themselves).

WarmWash 9mo ago

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

skybrian 9mo ago
Maybe true for some apps, but I suspect we will still have a vibrant ecosystem of package managers and open source libraries and coding agents will know how to use them.
- marginalia_nu 9mo ago
  What would be the point of that? If LLMs ever actually become competent, surely they can just implement what they need.
  - wongarsu 9mo ago
    The same reason why they exist now. Why spend millions of tokens on designing, implementing and debugging something, followed by years of discovering edge cases in the real world, if I can just use a library that already did all of that Sure, leftpad and python-openai aren't hugely valuable in the age of LLMs, but redis and ffmpeg are still as useful as ever. Probably even more useful now that LLMs can actually know and use all their obscure features
    - storystarling 9mo ago
      They know the syntax but seem to miss the architectural context. I've found that models will happily generate valid Redis commands that introduce race conditions or break state consistency the moment you have concurrency. It saves typing but you still need to design the locking strategy yourself.
reactordev 9mo ago

DarkSource 9mo ago

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p0nce 9mo ago

It is effective but once cost of creating something is down, then you have less reason to collaborate and depend on each other vs asking your own LLM to build your own bubble. When paired with new-found cognitive laziness and lack of motivation when you then use no AI it's not sure of the second order effects.

pixl97 9mo ago
>then you have less reason to collaborate and depend on each other vs asking your own LLM to build your own bubble What's interesting in reading comments like this is reading the same type of message across a bunch of different fields and aspects of life. "When continents move, not only the weather changes" If GenAI keeps increasing it's abilities and doesn't bankrupt a number of companies first, I think it's going to make a lot of people bubbles that encompass their entire lives. It's not difficult to imagine little pockets of hyperreality were some peoples lives are only feed by generated content and their existence starts to behave more like a video game than having any grounding in the physical. It's going to be interesting what the fractured remains of society look like in that future.

nicoburns 9mo ago

Something I've noticed is that AI code generation makes it easier/faster to generate code while shifting more work of the work of keeping code correct and maintainable to the code review stage. That can be highly problematic for open source projects that are typically already bottlenecked by maintainer review bandwidth. It can be mitigated by PR submitters doing a review and edit pass prior to submitting a PR. But a lot of submitters don't currently do this, and in my experience the average quality of PRs generated by AI is definitely significantly lower than those not generated by AI.

echelon 9mo ago
The maintainers can now do all the work themselves. With the time they save using AI, they can get much more work done. So much that having other engineers learn the codebase is probably not worth it anymore. Large scale software systems can be maintained by one or two folks now. Edit: I'm not going to get rate limited replying to everyone, so I'll just link another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46765785
- shafyy 9mo ago
  Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not?
- wooderson_iv 9mo ago
  Do you have anecdotes or evidence of this or is it speculative?
- j16sdiz 9mo ago
  Those are the most mentally exhausting task. Are you sure putting this burden on single person is good?
- tracker1 9mo ago
  No, because proper QA/QC will be the bottleneck.... AI is ill-suited to test for fit/use. I built an ANSi terminal with AI assist (rust/wasm/canvas)... it literally took longer to get the scrollback feature working with keyboard and mousewheel interactions than it took to get the basic rendering correct. And there are still a few bugs in it. In the end, you should not just skip QA/QC and fitness testing. Many things can fit a technical spec and still be absolutely horrible. With AI assisted developmnet, imo it's that much more important to get the UX right. I don't want 10x the apps if they're all half-implemented garbage that look like garbage are hard to use and just painful to install, maintain and use. Library creation still has a place here... and so far, getting AI code assistants to actually understand and use a given library that may be less popular has been at the very least, interresting.

maximgeorge 9mo ago

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gyanchawdhary 9mo ago

interesting as an econ thought experiment .. but it assumes OSS revenue comes from direct developr engagement .. In practice .. most successful OSS is funded by enterprises .. cloud vendors .. or consulting engagements .. where broader adoption, including AI mediated usage, often increases demand of said OSS project

deleted 9mo ago

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neko-kai 9mo ago

On the contrary, I hope vibe coding revives Linux desktop into a truly usable platform. e.g. Vibe coding defeats GNOME developers' main argument for endlessly deleting features and degrading user experience - that features are ostensibly "hard to maintain". Well, LLMs are rapidly reducing development costs to 0. The bottleneck for UI development is now testing, and here desktop Linux has advantage - Linux users have been trained like Pavlov's dogs to test and write detailed upstream bug reports, something Windows and macOS users just don't do.

croes 9mo ago
You don't think the current prices of LLMs will stay? At some point the investors want to see profit.
Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
Is the maintenance due to code or due to people / politics / etc? LLMs won't change that. Also it's a formal system and process, "vibe" coding is anything but. Call me curmudgeony (?) but I don't think "vibe coding" should be a phrase used to describe LLM assisted software engineering in large / critical systems.
rvz 9mo ago
> On the contrary, I hope vibe coding revives Linux desktop into a truly usable platform. Oh sweet summer child. > Well, LLMs are rapidly reducing development costs to 0. And maintainance costs along with technical debt rapidly goes up.

ipaddr 9mo ago

For me spending time on my open source projects doesn't make sense anymore. People (the community and employers) previously were impressed because of the amount of work required. Now that respect is gone as people can't automatically tell on the surface if this is a low effort vibe code or something else. Community engagement has dropped. Stars aren't being given out as freely. People aren't actively reading your code like they use to. For projects done before llms you can still link effort and signal but for anything started now.. everyone assumes it's llm created. No one want to read that code and not in the same way you would read other humans. Fewer will download the project. Many of the reasons why I wrote open source is gone. And knowing the biggest/only engagement will come from llms copying your work giving you no credit.. what's the point?

Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
But effort / amount of work shouldn't be a deciding factor - I think anyone can churn out code if they choose to. But it's the type and quality of it. Nobody cares if you wrote 5000 LOC, what they care about is what it does, how it does it, how fast and how good it does it, and none of those qualifiers are about volume.
9dev 9mo ago
Eh, I don't believe that. Smartphones have amazing cameras, and we still have photographers. There are CNC saws and mills that will ship you your perfectly realised CAD prints, yet there are still carpenters and a vibrant community of people making their own furniture. These examples go on and on. Without any kind of offence implied: As maintainer of a few open source projects, I'm happy if it stops being an employability optimisation vector. Many of the people who don't code for fun but to get hired by FAANG aren't really bringing joy to others anyway. If we end up with a small web of enthusiasts who write software for solving challenges, connecting intellectually with likeminded people, and altruism—then I'm fine with that. Let companies pay for writing software! Reduce the giant dependency chains! Have less infrastructure dedicated to distributing all that open source code! What will remain after that is the actual open source code true to the idea.
- 9mo ago

contravariant 9mo ago

I'm never quite sure what to think of papers that have a conclusion and then build a mathematical model to support it.

tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
Science starts with hypothesis and predictions.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  Yes, but it's easy, and incorrect, to start with an answer and build your work backwards rather than proving your hypothesis with evidence.

marginalia_nu 9mo ago

> When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid. I can't think of even a single example of OSS being monetized through direct user engagement. The bulk of it just isn't monetized at all, and what is monetized (beyond like a tip jar situation where you get some coffee money every once in a while) is primarily sponsored by enterprise users, support license sales, or through grants, or something like that. A few projects like Krita sell binaries on the steam store.

nprateem 9mo ago
Terraform, ansible, countless others. No community=no enterprise version, no awareness
dfox 9mo ago
There is this kind of webdev-adjacent niche where the model of using documentation (or even intentionally sub-par documentation) as a marketing funnel for consulting and/or "Pro" versions is a thing. These projects are somewhat vocal about vibe coding killing their business models. If these projects really create any meaningful value is another question.
WorldMaker 9mo ago
> what is monetized (beyond like a tip jar situation where you get some coffee money every once in a while) is primarily sponsored by enterprise users, support license sales, or through grants, or something like that All of those examples are the "direct user engagement" in question. No one tips a tip jar that they don't see. Enterprise users don't sponsor projects or buy licenses when they don't know they are using projects they should sponsor or buy a better license. If an LLM is automating your `npm install` you probably don't see the funding requests. Are you running `npm fund` in your spare time? If an LLM is automating your need to lookup library documentation you probably don't see that the library's own documentation has a Ko-Fi link or GitHub Sponsors request. Would you check library websites and GitHub repos on your own for such things without the need to read their documentation?

BoredPositron 9mo ago

I have written so many small scripts and apps that do exactly what I want. The general purpose OSS projects are always a compromise. I believe if LLMs mature some more years we will see a decline in these general purpose projects and will see a rise in personal apps. I dont think its something to worry about.

tinyhouse 9mo ago

There's a balance between coding by hand and vibe coding that is important. The less you understand the code, the more boring maintaining the software becomes. It's OK for throw away code, but not for serious open source projects. Use it as a powerful tool rather than your replacement.

rtp4me 9mo ago

I wonder how many OSS projects are using AI to actively squash bugs so their projects are more rock-solid than before. Also, seems to me if your project underwent a full AI standardized code-quality check (using 2 or 3 AI models), it would be considered the "standard" from which other projects could use. For example, if you needed a particular piece of code for your own project, the AI tooling could suggest leveraging an existing gold-standard project.

sailfast 9mo ago

It _might_ kill open source. It might lower revenue opportunities according to this abstract. Bit of a click-bait paper title.

OrvalWintermute 9mo ago

maybe we just need License-Aware Vibe Coding that can link back to code snippet provenance similar to SBOMs?

bluejay2387 9mo ago

Does it seem to anyone else that author's have created a definition for 'vibe coding' that is specifically designed to justify their paper? Also that their premise is based on the assumption that developers will be irresponsible about the use of these tools ("often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers") so that it would actually be people killing open source not 'Vibe Coding'? Just a guess on my part, but once developers learn to use these tools and we get over the newness I think this will be great for open source. With these tools open source projects can compete with an army of corporate developers while alleviating some of the pressure on overworked under-rewarded maintainers.

korenmiklos 9mo ago
Author here. We have the productvity-increasing effect of AI coding agents in the model (you're right, we're using "vibe coding" as a catch-all here). Our claim is that rewards to OSS developers (visibility and recognition in the dev community, future sponsorships, upsells to business users etc) fall faster than productivity increases. OSS devs lose the incentives to create software for others and respond to their needs.

j4coh 9mo ago

I am not sure if it kills open source, but it probably kills open core. You can just take a project like GitLab and ask an LLM, conveniently trained on the GitLab enterprise edition source code, to generate you a fresh copy of whatever features of EE you care about, but with the license laundered.

deleted 9mo ago

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delegate 9mo ago

There's some irony in the fact that LLMs are in large part possible because of open source software. From the tools which were used to design and develop the models (programming languages, libraries) to the operating systems running them to the databases used for storing training data .. plus of course they were trained mostly on open source code. If OSS didn't exist, it's highly unlikely that LLMs would have been built.

blibble 9mo ago
> If OSS didn't exist, it's highly unlikely that LLMs would have been built. would anyone want SlopHub Copilot if it had been trained exclusively on Microsoft's code? (rhetorical question)
jdiff 9mo ago
Turns out that it's only in myth that a snake can eat its own tail without dying.

verdverm 9mo ago

This study seems flawed at the assumptions and from the start "most" maintainers make exactly zero dollars. Further, OSS monetization rarely involves developer engagement, it's been all about enterprise feature gating

alentred 9mo ago

Not an answer to all of our problems, but I wonder if we will see a wider adoption of more complex contribution models. Like "Lieutenants Workflow" Linux was known for, for example. Many possible workflows are explored in the Git Book [1]. [1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-Workflows https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-W...

pmarreck 9mo ago

Related but not sure how much attention it's getting: GPL is a dead man walking since you can have any LLM cleanroom a new implementation in a new language from a public spec with verifiable "never looked at the original source" and it can be more permissively-licensed however you wish (MIT, BSD etc). case in point, check out my current deps on the project I'm currently working on with LLM assist: https://github.com/pmarreck/validate/tree/yolo/deps https://github.com/pmarreck/validate/tree/yolo/deps "validate" is a project that currently validates over 100 file formats at the byte level; its goal is to validate as many formats as possible, for posterity/all time. Why did I avoid GPL (which I am normally a fan of) since this is open-source? I have an even-higher-level project I'm working on, implementing automatic light parity protection (which can proactively repair data without a RAID/ZFS setup) which I want to make for sale, whose code will (initially) be private, and which uses this as a dependency (no sense in protecting data that is already corrupted). Figured I'd give this to the world for free in the meantime. It's already found a bunch of actually-corrupt files in my collection (note that there's still some false-positive risk; I literally released this just yesterday and it's still actively being worked on) including some cherished photos from a Japan trip I took a few years ago that cannot be replaced. It has Mac, Windows and Linux builds. Check the github actions page.

natebc 9mo ago
Did something change? Is LLM generated stuff now able to be protected with copyrights? I was under the impression that copyright was only available for works created by people.
- pmarreck 9mo ago
  Copyright has never required the absence of tools, only the presence of human creative agency. LLMs don’t change that. They’re just tools. The relevant question is whether a human exercised creative judgment in selecting, shaping, or editing the output. Which I most certainly did. Otherwise my month of work here would have just been a minute and a single prompt and then just grabbing a coffee. We already handle this with cameras, compilers, spell-checkers, and procedural generation. If you push a button and accept whatever falls out, you may not have authorship. If you meaningfully direct and curate the result, you almost certainly do. Responsibility still lands on the human, which is a good sanity check: there is no such thing as “LLM-authored but human-unaccountable” work. Pretending otherwise is just outsourcing epistemic responsibility to a stochastic tool. Similarly, you can't both assign blame to me when things go wrong, but credit to the LLM when things go right. Or vice versa.

donatj 9mo ago

As the maintainer of a handful of small projects, what I have seen for better or worse is tickets and pull requests completely dry up. My guess is instead of Googling "library that does X" people are asking AI to solve the problem and it's regurgitating a solution in place? That's my theory anyway.

Olshansky 9mo ago

Yes and no. --- Concrete example of a no: I set up [1] in such a way that anyone can implement a new blog -> rss feed; docs, agents.md, open-source, free, etc... Concrete example of a yes: Company spends too much money on simple software. --- Our Vision --- I feel the need to share: https://grove.city/ https://grove.city/ Human Flywheel: Human tips creator <-> Creator engages with audience Agent Flywheel: Human creates creative content <-> Agent tips human Yes, it uses crypto, but it's just stablecoins. This is going to exist in some fashion and all online content creation (OSS and other) will need it. --- As with everything, it Obvious [1] https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds https://github.com/Olshansk/rss-feeds

Sevii 9mo ago

Vibecoding is great for open source. Open source is already dominated by strong solo programmers like antirez, linus, etc. People with very strong motivations to create software they see as necessary. Vibecoding makes creating open source projects easier. It makes it easier to get from an idea to "Hey guys check this out!" The only downside to open source is the fly by PRs vibecoding enables which are currently draining maintainer time.

progx 9mo ago
And make one PR after another, i can see how happy Linus & Co. would be of all the garbage features ;-)
tracker1 9mo ago
I think the solution to the latter is simply to maintain high standards in terms of structure and organization. I've always been a fan of KISS should override any other non-requirement of software. Any my non-requirement, I mean anything that is just subjective. Don't create complexity you don't actually need, or that doesn't make an outsized contribution to making other areas of the code easier to reason with. Sometimes having dozens of one-off scripts is easier/simpler than trying to create the uber-flexibly one tool does all solution.

program_whiz 9mo ago

All this talk about how you can vibecode all your apps now, "why use OSS?" is making me laugh. Sure for a little website or a small tool, maybe even a change to your somewhat complex codebase that you thoroughly check and test. Is anyone replacing firefox, chromium, postgres, nginx, git, linux, etc? It would be idiotic to trade git for a vibe coded source control. I can't even imagine the motivations, maybe "merges the way I like it"? Not sure, but anyone who's saying this stuff hasn't even taken the basic first level glance at what it would entail. By all means, stop paying $10 a month to "JSON validator SaSS", but also don't complain with the little niggling bugs, maintenance and organization that comes with it. But please stop pretending you can just vibe code your own Kafka, Apache, Vulkan, or PostGRES. Yes, you can probably go faster (possibly not in the right direction if inexperienced), but ultimately, something like that would still require very senior, experienced person, using the tool in a very guided way with heavy review. By why take on the maintenance, the bug hunting, and everything else, unless that is your main business objective? Even if you can 10x, if you use that to just take on 10x more maintenance, you haven't increased velocity. To really go faster, that 10x must be focused on the right objective -- distinctive business value. If you use that 10x to generate hundreds of small tools you now have to juggle and maintain, that have no docs or support, no searchable history of problems solved, you may have returned yourself to 1x (or worse). This is the old "we'll write our own inhouse programming language" but leaking out to apps. Sure, java doesn't work _exactly_ the way you want it to, you probably have complaints. But writing your own lang will be a huge hit to whatever it was you actually wanted to use the language for, and you lose all the docs, forums, LSP / debugging tools, ecosystem, etc.

barelysapient 9mo ago

I think LLMs also kill off most programming languages. I think we’ll end up with a handful of languages that LLMs most proficient at writing for and the languages required for device or processor compatibility. The cost improvement for an LLM to emit a feature (with an engineer in the loop) is too much of an improvement. We’ll look at engineers coding in C the same way we look at engineers today who code in assembly. LLM enabled development becomes the new abstraction; probably with a grammar and system for stronger specification formalization.

delaminator 9mo ago
I've done a bit of experimentation with that. And the irony is Rust seems to fare best because of the error messages of the compiler. I have had a lot of conversations with Claude about it and it supports that theory.
- 13rac1 9mo ago
  Warning: Claude may support the theory, because Claude is a sycophant.
  - delaminator 9mo ago
    I have a well-calibrated ego.
    - recursive 9mo ago
      You're absolutely right.
- hxugufjfjf 9mo ago
  Claude told me the exact opposite. Always claims that Python or JavaScript is the best choice because its training corpus is so much larger than the alternatives.

deleted 9mo ago

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ozten 9mo ago

Generative AI is a major setback to OSS licensing. I've been on projects where we needed to do a "cleanroom" implementation and vet the team has never viewed the source code of competing products. Now in the gen AI era, coding agents are IP laundering machines. They are trained on OSS code, but the nuances of the original licenses are lost. On the whole, I think it is a net gain for civilization, but if we zoom into OSS licensing... not good.

kode-targz 9mo ago
It could be a net gain for civilization if it stayed open, decentralized and off the hands of private companies, but that's not at all the case. Only tecchies care or even know about open models
- ozten 9mo ago
  Regardless of open or closed models, the reason it is a net gain is that the cost of software production is collapsing and will trend towards zero. Example: We can achieve more climate solutions (and faster) thanks to technological acceleration.
  - tracker1 9mo ago
    We just need to consume 1.21gwatts of electricity, and then we can invest in nuclear power in the past.
- finaard 9mo ago
  LLMs can be quite useful in reverse engineering - there's typically a lot of steps which are not really difficult, but are hard to script, and still require a bit of an idea what's going on. Quite a bit of that can be automated with LLMs now - so it's also a lot easier now to figure what your proprietary blob does, and either interface with it, or just publish an implementation of the functionality as open source, potentially messing with your business plan.
tracker1 9mo ago
Probably fair... would also be interesting to try to limit the use of say GPL code to maintaining interoperability, not duplication of internal methods, etc. I also think that the amount of MIT/ISC/BSD, etc. licensed code, with whatever MS and other commercial entities have contributed for this use is probably enough to not be a significant difference to model quality though.

dev_l1x_be 9mo ago

I think it is not killing opensource. It is changing it. There are more smaller scoped projects created for specific purposes instead of creating a huge project that has gazillion features supporting everything. At least this is my experience.

tracker1 9mo ago
Largely my take as well.. there's also a LOT of slop and not enough polish or completeness in terms of UX and usability.

tracker1 9mo ago

I reject the assertion that AI Vibe Coding has to have any affect on how OSS maintainers get paid (or not). Most of those that are paid, are paid because their job is related but the OSS library/project itself is not directly monetized. I don't see AI/Vibe coding changing this... except that now the maintainer can choose or not to accept or use those tools on their project or not. But the assertion that everything needs to change is absurd. Articles like this are similar in my mind to arguments for communism because every artist deserves a living wage... that's just not how society can sustain itself in reality. Maybe in a world without scarcity, but I don't see scarcity going away any time soon.

sanskritical 9mo ago

Open source software, by the admission of this article, is a critical input to AI agents useful for code generation. So the way I see it is that there is now an entire industry that is incentivized to financially support open source software for entirely new reasons. To keep the models trained on new languages, libraries, and developments in computer science, they need to make sure that high quality modern code is still freely available, forever. Vibe coding eventually creates more value for FOSS, not less.

reustle 9mo ago
There is a reasonable argument that there won’t be many new languages now that models are sufficiently trained. If anything, we may see languages optimized for models and not humans.
gegtik 9mo ago
Seems you are arguing that The Tragedy Of The Commons could never happen because people benefit from the Commons

mellosouls 9mo ago

Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid A recent discussion on a related topic, apparently following the same misguided idea of how OSS is motivated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565281 (All my new code will be closed-source from now on: 93 points, 112 comments)

matkoniecz 9mo ago

from abstract > When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement (...) Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid. so it applies to narrow slice of OSS

devinprater 9mo ago

I'm completely blind. I like Linux. I've started to love Android since getting a Samsung and getting rid of OnePlus, cause accessibility. Termux is cool, but it's accessibility wasn't. So, I had Gemini rangle it up a bit into my fork of Termux [1] Now it reads (usually) only newly incoming text, I can feel around the screen to read a line at a time, and cursor tracking works well enough. Then I got Emacs and Emacspeak working, having Gemini build DecTalk (TTS engine) for Termux and get the Emacspeak DecTalk speech server working with that. I'm still amazed that, with a Bluetooth keyboard, I have Linux, and Emacs, in my pocket. I can write Org and Markdown, read EPUB books in Emacs with Nov.el, look at an actual calendar not just a list of events, and even use Gemini CLI and Claude Code, all on my phone! This is proof that phones, with enough freedom, can be workstations. If I can get Orca working on a desktop environment in Termux-GUI. But even with just Emacs and the shell, I can do quite a bit. Then I decided to go wild and make an MUD client for Emacs/Emacspeak, since accessible ones for Android are limited, and I didn't trust my hacks to Termux to handle Tintin++ very well. So, Emacs with Emacspeak it was, and Elmud [2] was born. Elmud has a few cool features. First of all, since Emacspeak has voice-lock, like font-lock but for TTS, Ansi colors can be "heard", like red being a deeper voice. Also a few MUD clients have sound packs on Windows, which make them sound more like a modern video game, while still being text-based. I got a few of those working with Elmud. You just load one of the supported MUD's, and the sound pack is downloaded and installed for you. It's easy and simple. And honestly, that's what I want my tools to provide, something I, or anyone else who chooses to use them, that is easy to get the most out of. None of this would have been possible without AI. None of it would have been done. It would have remained a dream. And yes, it was all vibe-coded, mostly with Codex 5.2 on high thinking. And yes, the code may look awful. But honestly, how many closed-source programs look just as bad or even worse under the covers of compilation? [1] https://github.com/devinprater/Talking-termux-app https://github.com/devinprater/Talking-termux-app [2] https://github.com/devinprater/elmud https://github.com/devinprater/elmud

chfritz 9mo ago

AI is poisoning the well from which it drinks. If OSS withers or dies, what will AI train on to get better? Same with StackOverflow.

wessorh 9mo ago

I think corporate cloud killed opensource, AI is simply a nail in its coffin. OpenAI's recent announcement did more for software patents than anyone could have ever done when they floated thy own of your ideas.

wessorh 9mo ago

geldedus 9mo ago

Just stop calling AI-assisted coding "vibe coding"

tug2024 9mo ago

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grimmzoww 9mo ago

Looking for solo devs testing AI continuation tool which i have built and need honest feedback if it is usefull or garbage if you are intersted in checking out - DM me

phendrenad2 9mo ago

"kills" is a strong word. The phenomenon of single-purpose self-service apps is not to be ignored, and we'll likely see people not only do that, but create apps for friends and family, leading to everyone having an "app guy" who makes apps for them, the same way many people have a "car guy" who can diagnose car problems before they need to take it to the shop,.. but open-source still has a place in high-complexity products where a very small number of people have the requisite knowledge to vibe-code it. E.G. don't expect people to be vibe-coding their own Unix kernels any time soon!