14 ms·

AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet

• VorpalWay 8mo ago
  This one is probably going to be controversial. But I feel highlighting the drawbacks are also important, not just the benefits.
  • _qib3 8mo ago
    It's quite unfortunate that this has to be controversial.
• jazz9k 8mo ago
  "If this was a problem already, OpenClaw's release, and this hiring by OpenAI to democratize agentic AI further, will only make it worse. Right now the AI craze feels the same as the crypto and NFT boom, with the same signs of insane behavior and reckless optimism." There are definitely people abusing AI and lying about what it can actually do. However, Crypto and NFTs are pretty much useless. Many people (including me) have already increased productivity using LLMs. This technology just isn't going away.
  • ggm 8mo ago
    The underlying tech in a signed public ledger, using chaining methods and merkle trees to record things with non-repudiation, thats useful. I went to a meeting which included people from the Reserve Bank of Australia or the financial regulator, and they said that between nation states, settlement was about mutuality, and absent a regulator to tell you what to do, federated processes around things like this were entirely rational choices. Nothing whatsoever about Bitcoin, Ethereum, the hype machine, rug pulls, just the underlying tech using normal PKI and some data structures and HSM backed processes. The regulator said informally, in a regulated monopoly agreeing to use mutual (dis)trust methods like a chain would be acceptable as an audit method to the regulator. Nothing about you or me, nothing about hype. Mechanistic settlement methods amongst competitors in a reasonably transparent manner. Some payment chains are painful. An awful lot of middlemen take a cut. Some payment chains impose burdens on the endpoint like 90 day settlement debts which could be avoided with some use of tech. Nothing about the hype, just modification to financial transactions, but they could be done other ways as well (as could the settlement ideas above) NFT are the same logic as bearer bonds. They're useful to very specific situations of value transfer, and almost nothing else. The use isn't about the artwork on the front, its the posession of a statement of value. Like bonds, they get discounted. The value is therefore a function of the yield and the trust in the chain of sigs asserting its a debt to that value. Not identical, but the concept stripped of the ego element isn't that far off. Please note I think bored ape and coins are stupid. I am not attempting to promote the hype. AI is the same. LLMs are useful. There are functional tools in this. The sheer amount of capital being sunk into venture plays is however, disconnected from that utility.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Terr_ 8mo ago
      Half-agree: "Blockchain" systems contain new and useful technology, but the useful technology is not new, and the new technology is not-so-useful. If we keep the useful stuff, we're basically back at regular old distributed databases. The key blockchain requirement is allowing unrestricted node membership. From that flows a dramatic explosion of security issues, performance issues, and N-level deep workarounds. In the case of a bunch of banks trying to keep each other honest, it's drastically simpler/faster/cheaper to allocate a certain number of fixed nodes to be run by different participants and trusted outside institutions. One doesn't need to trust every node, just the a majority is unlikely to be suborned, and you'll know in advance which majorities are possible. The bank in Australia probably doesn't want or need to shift some of that responsibility outside the group, onto literally anybody who shows up with some computing power.
      • ggm 8mo ago
        That's fair.
    • akoboldfrying 8mo ago
      An analogy for cryptocurrency that I like is lasers. I remember reading an Usborne book about lasers as a kid and thinking they were the coolest thing ever and would doubtless find their way into every technology because glowing beams of pure light energy, how could they not transform the world! Lasers turn out to be useful for... eye surgery, and pointing at things, and reading bits off plastic discs, and probably a handful of other niche things. There just aren't that many places where what they can do is actually needed, or better than other more pedestrian ways of accomplishing the same thing. I think the same is true of crypto, including NFTs.
      • ggm 8mo ago
        In 1982 I joined Leeds university as a computer operator/assistant. First job out of a CS degree in another uni. The department head was a laser physics specialist and I, and other snobs used to say "what does a laser man know about REAL computer science" and act outraged. More fool us. More power to him. He was well ahead of the curve, him and his laser physics friends worldwide.
  • verdverm 8mo ago
    You should check out HN /new and /show the last couple of weeks. It's just like all the ICO, NFT, and other crypto launches, but for all the little things that you can do with Ai. Everybody or their bot has some new game changing Ai project. It's a tiring mess right now, which I do hope will similarly die down in time For clarity, I was a big fan of blockchain before it got bad, still am for things like ZKP and proof-of-authority, and I am similarly very excited for what Ai enables, but (imo) one cannot easily argue there is not a spam problem that feels similar.
    • BoneShard 8mo ago
      Check LinkedIn, it's like HN times 100.
      • verdverm 8mo ago
        I had heard, but then omg, I was on there for the first time since and scrolled the feed for a few flicks just to see
  • torben-friis 8mo ago
    The tech isn’t going away, but its usability is probably going to be recalibrated once we factor in the long term danger ( effects on learning and acquiring/maintaining skills, maintenance costs of ai made code, etc). We’ll still have the “best code tooling ever invented” stuff, but if the market is assuming “intellectual workers all replaced”, there’s still a bubble pop waiting for us.
  • shimman 8mo ago
    I don't like the weasel word "democratize" because there is nothing democratic about being forced to use a tool on condition of keeping your job. Democratization goes both ways, if you can't destroy something you cannot truly control it; I'm sure if you put it to an actual vote, many people would be surprised at the results.
  • bsza 8mo ago
    It doesn't have to go away, it just needs to be better regulated. I could also increase my productivity by taking Adderall, if that was my end goal. But most people don't, since there are other factors to take into consideration, like becoming unable to function without it, or long-term cognitive decline...
• keernan 8mo ago
  >>... Crypto ... are [is] pretty much useless. Other than by corrupt criminals and mafia types who have a need to covertly hide cash. And then the current administration wants the government to 'protect' crypto investors against big losses. Gotta love it.
  • henry2023 8mo ago
    >> Other than by corrupt criminals and mafia types who have a need to covertly hide cash. I’ve got an Argentinian friend who sends crypto to his mother because he pays less than 0.5 % in fees and exchange rates instead of close to 5% using the traditional way. From now on I’ll call him a corrupt criminal.
    • keernan 8mo ago
      No need to be snarky. I didn't realize there actually were any legitimate reasons to own crypto.
      • foxglacier 8mo ago
        Really? For such an obvious use case, it sounds like everything you know about the topic is what you've heard from emotionally manipulative social media users. You should work out ideas yourself instead of just copying popular rhetoric which is often wrong, despite being popular.
  • nyc_data_geek1 8mo ago
    And anyone who is under sanction or lives in a nation under economic sanction, and wants access to a means of sending payments across borders that would otherwise be closed to them. And anyone who lives in a polity whose local currency may be undergoing rapid devaluation/inflation. And anyone who needs a form of wealth that no local authority is technically capable of alienating them from - ie: if you need to pack everything in a steamer trunk to escape being herded into cattle cars, you can memorize a seed phrase and no one can stop you from taking your wealth with you. And any polity who may no longer wish to use dollars as the international lingua franca of trade, as the global foreign exchange reserve currency, to reduce the degree to which their forex reserves prop up American empire. Sadly, all of these use cases appear increasingly relevant as time goes on.
• nblgbg 8mo ago
  Isn’t it also destroying the internet with low-quality content and affecting content creation in general? Can LLMs still rely on data from the open internet for training?
  • bmurphy1976 8mo ago
    I'm going to take issue with AI destroying the internet. Our short attention span profit driven culture was already well on it's way to trashing everything that was good. AI is only accelerating the inevitable.
    • slopinthebag 8mo ago
      Ya but that's like saying we were going 10kmh, it's nbd that we accelerate to 1000kmh since we were gonna hit the wall anyways
      • _heimdall 8mo ago
        This is exactly how we collectively "solve" so many problems today though, its far from unique to this topic. We over medicate people, especially the elderly, because each new med has side effects and they're dying eventually anyway. We print more and more debt to paper over massive budget surpluses because the unspoken reality is that we're financially screwed either way. We pile more and more regulations on because we'd rather further grow the government and kick the can a few more times. We bolt one new emissions system after another on our diesel engines because they're already unreliable, who cares. We don't consider how we got here, only what the next step we take should be. And don't even ask where a step should be taken, progress requires changing things constantly and we rarely give ourselves time to look back and retrace our steps.
        • fyredge 8mo ago
          Your examples are not supporting your premise. Over medication is from all the attempts to fix all the various medical conditions found. Adding regulations are to fix all the problems of people finding new ways to abuse the system. This is entirely opposite from accelerationism, which would advocate for less medication so that sick people die quicker, and less regulation so that society would be exploited faster and collapse faster.
• truncate 8mo ago
  Three patterns I've noticed on the open-source projects I've worked on: 1. AI slop PRs (sometimes giant). Author responds to feedback with LLM generated responses. Show little evidence they actually gave any thought of their own towards design decisions or implementation. 2. (1) often leads me to believe they probably haven't tested it properly or thought of edge cases. As reviewer you now have to be extra careful about it (or just reject it). 3. Rise in students looking for job/internship. The expectation is that LLM generated code which is untested will give them positive points as they have dug into the codebase now. (I've had cases where they said they haven't tested the code, but it should "just work"). 4. People are now even more lazy to cleanup code. Unfortunately, all of these issues come from humans. LLMs are fantastic tools and as almost everyone would agree they are incredibly useful when used appropriately.
  • Nition 8mo ago
    > Unfortunately, all of these issues come from humans. I've been thinking about this recently. As annoying as all the bots on Twitter and Reddit are, it's not bots spinning up bots (yet!), it's other humans doing this to us.
    • TOMDM 8mo ago
      > it's not bots spinning up bots (yet!) Well, some of them are, but the bots bot is spun up by a human (or maybe bot n+1)
      • Nition 8mo ago
        Great bots have little bots, if one should deign to write 'em And little bots have lesser bots, and so ad infinitum...
  • kerkeslager 8mo ago
    I've got a few open source projects out there, and I've almost never received any PRs for them until AI, simply because they were things I did for myself and never really promoted to anyone else. But now I'm getting obviously-AI PRs on a regular basis. Somehow people are using AI to find my unpromoted stuff and submit PRs to it. My canned response now is to respond, "Can you link me to the documentation you're using for this?" It works like a charm, the clanker doesn't ever respond.
• pvillano 8mo ago
  AI training is information theft. AI slop is information pollution.
  • pvillano 8mo ago
    Search feels like fishing in an ocean of floating plastic. Social media feels like parks smothered with smog. It makes you stupid like leaded gas. We'll probably be stuck with it forever, like PFAS
• dtnewman 8mo ago
  Open Source isn't going anywhere. Open Contribution might be on the way out. I built an open source command line tool (https://github.com/dtnewman/zev https://github.com/dtnewman/zev) that went very minorly viral for a few days last year. What I found in the following week is a pattern of: 1) People reaching out with feature requests (useful) 2) People submitting minor patches that take up a few lines of code (useful) 3) People submitting larger PRs, that were mostly garbage #1 above isn't going anywhere. #2 is helpful, especially since these are easy to check over. For #3, MOST of what people submitted wasn't AI slop per se, but just wasn't well thought out, or of poor quality. Or a feature that I just didn't want in the product. In most cases, I'd rather have a #1 and just implement it myself in the way that I want to code organized, rather than someone submitting a PR with poorly written code. What I found is that when I engaged with people in this group, I'd see them post on LinkedIn or X the next day bragging about how they contributed to a cool new open-source project. For me, the maintainer, it was just annoying, and I wasn't putting this project out there to gain the opportunity to mentor junior devs. In general, I like the SQLite philosophy of we are open source, not open contribution. They are very explicit about this, but it's important for anyone putting out an open source project that you have ZERO obligation to accept any code or feature requests. None.
  • aethertap 8mo ago
    This comment really hit me - I have a few things I've worked on but never released, and I didn't even realize it was basically because I don't want to deal with all of that extra stuff. Maybe I'll release them with this philosophy.
• loeber 8mo ago
  This is a deeply pessimistic take, and I think it's totally incorrect. While I believe that the traditional open source model is going to change, it's probably going to get better than ever. AI agents mean that dollars can be directly translated into open-source code contributions, and dollars are much less scarce than capable OSS programmer hours. I think we're going to see the world move toward a model by which open source projects gain large numbers of dollar contributions, that the maintainers then responsibly turn into AI-generated code contributions. I think this model is going to work really, really well. For more detail, I have written my thoughts on my blog just the other day: https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-the-age https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-t...
  • lovich 8mo ago
    Why would people/companies donate more money to open source in the future that they don’t already donate today? It’s a tragedy of the commons problem. Most of the money available is not tied up to decision makers who are ideologically aligned with open source, so I don’t see why they’d donate any more in the future. They usually do so because they are critically reliant on a library that’s going to die, think it’s good PR, makes engineers happy(don’t think they care about that anymore), or they think they can gain control of some aspect of industry(looking at you futurewei and the corporate workers of the Rust project)
    • loeber 8mo ago
      Because donating to open source projects today has an extremely unclear payoff. For example, I donate to KDE, which is my favorite Linux desktop environment. However, this does not have a measurable impact on my day-to-day usage of KDE. It's very abstract in that I'm making a tiny, opaque contribution to its development, but I have no influence on what gets developed. More concretely, there are many features that I'd love to see in KDE which don't currently exist. It would be amazing if I could just donate $10, $20, $50 and submit a ticket for a maintainer to consider implementing the feature. If they agree that it's a feature worth having, then my donation easily covers running AI for an hour to get it done. And then I'd be able to use that feature a few days later.
• xtreak29 8mo ago
  Reviewing code was also a big bottleneck. With lot more untested code where authors don't care about reviewing their own code it will take even more toll on open source maintainers. Code quality between side projects and open source projects are different. Ensuring good code quality enables long term maintenance for open source projects that have to support the feature through the years as a compatibility promise.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • sodapopcan 8mo ago
    That's where pair programming came in but it turns out that most people hate each other so much that they'd rather work with a machine pretending to be a person. I realize there are many levels to this claim but I'm not being sarcastic at all here.
    • mycall 8mo ago
      Using an LLM is a form of pair programming.
      • batshit_beaver 8mo ago
        Yeah, akin to talking to a rubber ducky
        • sodapopcan 8mo ago
          I like to agree as sorta yes but also really no because it's a rubber ducky that doesn't give you the chance to come to your own conclusion and even if it does it has you questioning it.
          • squeefers 8mo ago
            i find its the opposite, LLMs can be made to agree with anything.... largely because that agreeability is in their system prompt
• michelsedgh 8mo ago
  I think I have seen more open source projects get released since LLMs came out and the rate seems to be increasing. The cost of making software and open sourcing it has gone down a lot. We see some slop but as the models get better, the quality will get better and from the pace I have seen we went from gpt-3.5 to now opus4.6 i dont think it will be long before the LLMs get much better than humans in coding!
  • tayo42 8mo ago
    Llms are already better then most people at coding for typical tasks imo. I finally got around to Claude code and the code it generates and the debugging it does is pretty good. Inb4 some random accuses me of being an idiot or shit engineer lol
    • michelsedgh 8mo ago
      Couldn’t agree more, people forget most software out there has generally shitty code anyways. Also this is the worst the llms will be and they will only get better as time goes on…
• PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
  From my POV (30 or so years working on the same FLOSS project), AI isn't "destroying Open Source" through an effect on contributions. It is, however, destroying open source through its ceaseless, relentless, unabatable crawling of open source git repositories, commit by commit rather than via git-clone(1). Project after project reports wasted time, increased hosting/bandwidth bills, and all around general annoyance from this UTTER BULLSHIT. But every morning, we wake up, and its still there, no sign of it ever stopping.
  • atomic128 8mo ago
    Poison Fountain provides an essentially endless stream of subtly incorrect code. Inexpensive to generate, expensive to detect/filter. We fill repos with poison and watch the crawlers consume it. https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fountain_an_antiai_weapon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou... This is war. Join us.
• zer00eyz 8mo ago
  The house is poorly put together cause the carpenter used a cheap nail gun and a crappy saw. LLMs are confidently wrong and make bad engineers think they are good ones. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect If you're a skilled dev, in an "common" domain, an LLM can be an amazing tool when you integrate it into your work flow and play "code tennis" with it. It can change the calculus on "one offs", "minor tools and utils" and "small automations" that in the past you could never justify writing. Im not a Lawyer, or a Doctor. I would never take legal advice or medical advice from an LLM. Im happy to work with the tool on code because I know that domain, because I can work with it, and take over when it goes off the rails.
  • bobpaw 8mo ago
    It is hard to test LLM legal/medical advice without risk of harm, but it is often exceedingly easy to test LLM generated code. The most aggravating thing to me is that people just don't. I think the best thing we can do is to encourage everyone who uses/trusts LLMs to test and verify more often.
• mifydev 8mo ago
  Frankly, I don't like this kinds of takes. Yes, people are seeing more spam in their pull requests, but that's just what it is - spam that you need to learn how to filter. For regular engineers who can use AI, it's a blessing. I'm a long time linux user - now I have more time to debug issues, submit them, and even do pull requests that I considered too time consuming in the past. I want and I can now spend more time on debugging Firefox issues that I see, instead of just dropping it. I'm still learning to use AI well - and I don't want to submit unverified slop. It's my responsibility to provide a good PR. I'm creating my own projects to get the hang of my setup and very soon I can start contributing to existing projects. Maintainers on the other hand need to figure out how to pick good contributors on scale.
  • sarchertech 8mo ago
    Well that’s the problem. AI is really good at making things that bypass people’s heuristics for spam. Someone can spam me with more AI slop than I can vet and it can pass any automated filter I can setup. The solution is probably closed contributions because figuring out good contributors at scale sounds like figuring out how to hire at scale, which we are horrible at as an industry.
• mhitza 8mo ago
  Hard drives shortage is already old news, CPUs are next.
• Veedrac 8mo ago
  > From what I've seen, models have hit a plateau where code generation is pretty good... > But it's not improving like it did the past few years. As opposed to... what? The past few months? Has AI progress so broken our minds as to make us stop believing in the concept of time?
  • martinald 8mo ago
    Yes a strange comment. Opus 4.5 is significantly better than before and Opus 4.6 is even better. Same with the 5.2 and 5.3 Codex models. If anything, the pace has increased. This may be one of the most important graphs to keep an eye on: https://metr.org/ https://metr.org/ and it tracks well to my anecdotal experience. You can see the industry did hit a bit of a wall in 2024 where the improvements drop below the log trend. However, in 2025 the industry is significantly _above_ the trend line.
    • bamboozled 8mo ago
      Are you seeing any meaningful improvements to anything you use though? Like have self-driving cars become really cheap and common place? Medicine improved? Is Netflix giving us an abundance of cheap, really good content to watch? How is your AI doctor? The geeks are telling us the LLMs are great, but that's about it. I'm seeing way more AI generated youtube thumbnails...I know you will say "give it time" but I'm pretty convinced the problems AI solves are not the hard problems required to boost an economy.
  • Aurornis 8mo ago
    I see these claims in a lot of anti-LLM content, but I’m equally puzzled. The pace of progress feels very fast right now. There is some desire to downplay or dismiss it all, as if the naysayers are going to get their “told you so” moment and it’s just around the corner. Yet the goalposts for that moment just keep moving with each new release. It’s sad that this has turned into a culture war where you’re supposed to pick a side and then blind yourself to any evidence that doesn’t support your chosen side. The vibecoding maximalists do the same thing on the other side of this war, but it’s getting old on both sides.
• mcny 8mo ago
  I feel like we are talking past each other. 1. I write hobby code all the time. I've basically stopped writing these by hand and now use an LLM for most of these tasks. I don't think anyone is opposed to it. I had zero users before and I still have zero users. And that is ok. 2. There are actual free and open source projects that I use. Sometimes I find a paper cut or something that I think could be done better. I usually have no clue where to begin. I am not sure if it even is a defect most of the time. Could it be intentional? I don't know. Best I can do is reach out and ask. This is where the friction begins. Nobody bangs out perfect code on first attempt but usually maintainers are kind to newcomers because who knows maybe one of those newcomers could become one of the maintainers one day. "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." LLM changed that. The newcomers are more like Linguini than Remy. What's the point in mentoring someone who doesn't read what you write and merely feeds it into a text box for a next token predictor to do the work. To continue the analogy from the Disney Pixar movie Ratatouille, we need enthusiastic contributors like Remy, who want to learn how things work and care about the details. Most people are not like that. There is too much going on every day and it is simply not possible to go in depth about everything. We must pick our battles. I almost forgot what I was trying to say. The bottom line is, if you are doing your own thing like I am, LLM is great. However, I would request everyone to have empathy and not spread our diarrhea into other people's kitchens. If it wasn't an LLM, you wouldn't simply open a pull request without checking first with the maintainers, right?
  • sheepscreek 8mo ago
    The real problem is that OSS projects do not have enough humans to manually review every PR. Even if they were willing to deploy agents for initial PR reviews, it would be a costly affair and most OSS projects won’t have that money.
    • softwaredoug 8mo ago
      Many open source projects are also (rightly) risk adverse and care more about avoiding regressions
    • mycall 8mo ago
• 0xbadcafebee 8mo ago
  Remember when projects were getting overwhelmed by PRs from students just editing a line in a README so they could win a t-shirt? That was 2020, and they weren't using AI. The open source community has been going downhill for a while. The new generation isn't getting mentored by the old generation, so stable, old-fogey methods established by Linux distributions are eschewed by the new kids. Technology advancement has made open source interactions a little too easy, and unnecessarily fragile. Some ecosystems focus way too much on crappy reusable components, and don't focus enough on supply chain security. Here's the good news: AI cannot destroy open source. As long as there's somebody in their bedroom hacking out a project for themselves, that then decides to share it somehow on the internet, it's still alive. It wouldn't be a bad thing for us to standardize open source a bit more, like templates for contributors' guides, automation to help troubleshoot bug reports, and training for new maintainers (to help them understand they have choices and don't need to give up their life to maintain a small project). And it's fine to disable PRs and issues. You don't have to use GitHub, or any service at all.
  • charcircuit 8mo ago
    >As long as there's somebody in their bedroom hacking out a project for themselves, that then decides to share it somehow on the internet, it's still alive. You don't even need somebody. AI agents themselves can make and share projects.
    • overfeed 8mo ago
      > AI agents themselves can make and share projects Copyright can't be assigned yo agents. You cant have Open Source without copyright as the enforcement mechanism. Millions of AI-generated, public-domain projects with no social proof to distinguish them is uncharted territory. My prediction is it would be shit-territory amd worse than what we have currently.
      • charcircuit 8mo ago
        >You cant have Open Source without copyright as the enforcement mechanism. Enforce what. Attribution? Open Source software doesn't requires software to require attribution for it to be considered open source. Public domain software can be open source.
• anilgulecha 8mo ago
  Prior to LLM the concept of "Open Source" could co-exist with "Free Software" - one was a more pragmatic view of how to develop software, the other a political activist position of how code powering our world should be. AI has laid bare the difference. Open Source is significantly impacted. Business models based on it are affected. And those who were not taking the political position find that they may not prefer the state of the world. Free software finds itself, at worst, a bit annoyed (need to figure out the slop problem), and at best, an ally in AI - the amount of free software being built right now for people to use is very high.
  • tjr 8mo ago
    I’ve seen different opinions. Can LLM-generated software be licensed under the GPL?
    • anilgulecha 8mo ago
      Can you link to them? The way the world is currently working is code created by someone (using AI) is being dealt with as if it was authored by that someone. This is across companies and FOSS. I think it's going to settle with this pattern.
    • hcayless 8mo ago
      If it can’t be copyrighted, then no. Licenses rely on the copyright holder’s right to grant the license. But that would also mean it’d be essentially public domain. I’m not sure there’s really settled legal opinion on this yet. Iirc it can’t be patented.
    • bonoboTP 8mo ago
      Your question has nothing to do with the GPL. If your concern is that the code may count as derivative work of existing code then you also can't use that code in a proprietary way, under any license. But that probably only applies if the LLM regurgitated a substantial amount of copyrighted code into your codebase.
      • 8mo ago
• tibiahurried 8mo ago
  Internet was a fun place … until they turned into s.. with ads all over. Social media destroyed it. AI is killing creativity and human collaboration; those long nights spent having pizza and coffee while debugging that stubborn issue or implementing yet another 3D engine… now it is all extremely boring.
  • GaryBluto 8mo ago
    > AI is killing creativity and human collaboration; those long nights spent having pizza and coffee while debugging that stubborn issue or implementing yet another 3D engine… now it is all extremely boring. One could also say Multi-Drug Therapy killed the solidarity and shared struggle found in leper colonies.
  • Aurornis 8mo ago
    You can still debug that hobby 3D engine any way you want. Anything you could do 5 years ago you can still do now. There is an entire new world of people having fun with LLM coding. There are people having fun with social media, too. These people having fun with their thing doesn’t make your thing less fun for you to do. Let people enjoy things. You can do your own thing and they do theirs. The internet is a big place and there’s room for everyone to find their own way to have fun. If you can’t enjoy your thing because someone else is doing it differently, that’s a you problem.
    • adithyassekhar 8mo ago
      Not really when there's economic incentive and when you need to eat.
      • josephg 8mo ago
        So you want to have fun coding by hand while also making bank along the way? Yeah, those days seem to be increasingly over. This is new for us, but it’s not new globally. There used to be professional portrait painters before photography ruined it. Lots of great artists honed their skills and made a living that way. And there were skilled weavers before the loom. Computers (humans who computed things) before the digital computer was invented. And so on. And I’m sure the first photographs don’t look as good as a skilled portrait painting. Arguably they still don’t. But that didn’t save portrait painting as a profession. We’ll be the same. You can still write code by hand for fun, just like you can paint for fun. I’m currently better at solving problems and writing code than Claude. But Claude is faster than I am, and it’s improving much faster than I am. I think the days of making big money for writing software by hand are mostly over.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• 1970-01-01 8mo ago
  We all know the solution will be yet another AI agent reviewing the reputation of the pull requests from the public and rating them. This even seems like an easy win for Microsoft and GitHub. Just make it already.
  • _heimdall 8mo ago
    Hello, social credit scores.
    • overgard 8mo ago
      What could go wrong.. I wonder if anyone in tech ever watches Black Mirror (other than the AI zealots that seem to watch it and go "SO MANY GREAT IDEAS!")
      • duskdozer 8mo ago
        Why would I ever need to study humanities or ethics? I just want to build cool stuff!
    • 1970-01-01 8mo ago
      You would never frame it like that. Think more like eBay buyer and seller ratings for GitHub pull requests. Seems very obvious. The reputation system doesn't involve money of any kind, but a number rating the overall smoothness of transaction of a pull request from the perspective of both sides.
      • _heimdall 8mo ago
        I don't really care about how it would be framed though. What's being described is a central authority creating a scoring mechanism to rate us as individuals. That's bad regardless of framing in my opinion. I don't think social credit scores have any dependence on involving money, for what its worth. Usually that's just a normal credit score rather than anything social.
• jongjong 8mo ago
  My current position is that AI companies should be taxed and the money should be distributed to open source developers. There is a strong legal basis for this to happen because if you read the MIT license, which is one of the most common and most permissive licenses, it clearly states that the code is made available for any "Person" to use and distribute. An AI agent is not a person so technically it was never given the right to use the code for itself... It was not even given permission to read the copyrighted code, let alone ingest it, modify it and redistribute it. Moreover, it is a requirement of the MIT license that the MIT copyright notice be included in all copies or substantial portions of the software... Which agents are not doing in spite of distributing substantial portions of open source code verbatim, especially when considered in aggregate. Moreover, the fact that a lot of open source devs have changed their views on open source since AI reinforces the idea that they never consented to their works being consumed, transformed and redistributed by AI in the first place. So the violation applies both in terms of the literal wording of the licenses and also based on intent. Moreover, the usage of code by AI goes beyond just a copyright violation of the code/text itself; they appropriated ideas and concepts, without giving due credit to their originators so there is a deeper ethical component involved that we don't have a system to protect human innovation from AI. Human IP is completely unprotected. That said, I think most open source devs would support AI innovation, but just not at their expense with zero compensation.
  • strawhatguy 8mo ago
    God please no. Do not involve government in this. That's a terrible terrible idea, and would do the opposite of intended.
  • foxglacier 8mo ago
    > they appropriated ideas and concepts, without giving due credit to their originators so there is a deeper ethical component No there isn't. We're all free to copy each other's ideas and concepts and not give any credit to their "originators" who aren't usually even the first people to think of them but just the previous person in the chain of copying ideas. That's how progress happens. No we should not inhibit our use of knowledge because every idea "belongs" to somebody. I'm not talking about copyright here, which is different and doesn't usually protect ideas and concepts anyway, at least none that are useful.
• kittbuilds 8mo ago
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• egedev 8mo ago
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• debarshri 8mo ago
  This weekend, I found an issue with Microsoft's new Golang version of sqlcmd. Ran Claude code, fixed the issue, which I wouldn't have done if agent stuff did not exist. The fix was contributed back to the project. I think it is about who is contributing, intention, and various other nuances. I would still say it is net good for the ecosystem.
  • mysterydip 8mo ago
    I think the problem is determining who is contributing, intention, and those other nuances take a human’s time and effort. And at some point the number of contributions becomes too much to sort through.
    • debarshri 8mo ago
      I think building enough barriers, processes, and mechanisms might work. I don't think it needs to be human effort.
      • username223 8mo ago
        So open source development should be more like job-hunting and hiring, where humans feed AI-generated resumes into AI resume filters which supposedly choose reasonable candidates to be considered by other humans? That sounds... not good.
      • ThrowawayR2 8mo ago
        If it's not human effort, it costs tokens, lots of tokens, that need to be paid for by somebody. The LLM providers will be laughing all the way to the bank because they get paid once by the people who are causing the problem and paid again by the person putting up the "barriers, processes, and mechanisms" to control the problem. Even better for them, the more the two sides escalate, the more they get paid.
  • softwaredoug 8mo ago
    That’s the positive case IMO - a human, you, remain responsible for the fix. It doesn’t matter if AI helped. The negative case are free running OpenClaw slop cannons that could even be malicious.
• softwaredoug 8mo ago
  Are there maintainers of mature open source projects that can share their AI coding workflow? The bias in AI coding discussions heavily skews greenfield. But I want to hear more from maintainers. By their nature they’re more conservative and care about balancing more varied constraints (security, performance, portability, code quality, etc etc) in a very specific vision based on the history of their project. They think of their project more like evolving some foundational thing gradually/safely than always inventing a new thing. Many of these issues don’t yet matter to new projects. So it’s hard to really compare the greenfield with a 20 year old codebase.
  • giancarlostoro 8mo ago
    I mean I have grabbed random non-greenfield projects and added features to them for my temporary / personal needs with Claude Code. The key thing is setting it up. The biggest thing is adopting good programming principles like breaking up godclasses. Things that help human devs consume code easier turns out it works for LLMs too.
    • softwaredoug 8mo ago
      I have done this sort of thing too. I’m curious about big, mature projects like numpy or the Linux kernel. It seems the users of this are so varied that refactors like what you describe would be rolled out more gradually than the usual AI workflow.
      • giancarlostoro 8mo ago
        I mean, you could do it, my concern is projects you have total control of that have files that are much larger than your model can hold in context windows, vs if you break up a legacy codebase so more files have more structure, it could work better, the other alternative is to make "map" files like ts has, or like headers in C where its just full of definitions of methods and really short descriptions, basically map out your entire codebase in easier to digest files to let the model find what functions its looking for. I usually have Claude give itself a summary of whats where in the codebase in the instructions.md file so it knows where to go instead of grepping around wasting more tokens.
• black_13 8mo ago
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• silverwind 8mo ago
  I think AI is a huge boon as it reduces the human bottleneck. AI is a tool that must to be used well and many people currently raising pull requests seem to think that they don't even need to read the changes which puts unnecessary burden on the maintainers. The first review must be by the user who prompted the AI, and it must be thorough. Only then I would even consider raising a PR towards any open source project.
  • shshshsjjjj 8mo ago
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  • maplethorpe 8mo ago
    I think this is still applying old-school thinking to the problem. The solution to the PR problem is probably something closer to an agentic swarm embedded within the repo, which reviews and approves PRs without any human intervention needed. This way both sides are happy.
• ramshanker 8mo ago
  At least for me personal open source project[1], it has been >5x boost. In speed, motivation. Operating knowledge level etc. At some places, I even put inline comment, "this generated function is not understood completely" ! Or may be a question on specific syntex (c++20). [1] https://github.com/ramshankerji/Vishwakarma/ https://github.com/ramshankerji/Vishwakarma/
  • OneOffAsk 8mo ago
    > this generated function is not understood completely I think this kind of stuff is OK for the most part. I think it's a thrilling part of computer science: building systems so complex they're just on the brink of what can be fully understood by a single person. It's what sets software engineering apart from other engineering fields where it's unacceptable not to fully understand the engineering, say, for factories, buildings, bridges, ships and infrastructure and such.
    • bigstrat2003 8mo ago
      What? It's not ok at all. If you don't understand what the code does, you have no business submitting that code.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • ramshanker 8mo ago
    3 days late clarification: It is for personal projects! Not for sumbitting pull requests to established projects.
• jandrewrogers 8mo ago
  It didn’t take AI to destroy Open Source, we were already doing it to ourselves. LLMs just magnified the existing structural issues and made them even easier to exploit. But the trajectory was already clear.
• thunderbong 8mo ago
  Looks to me that the issue is with the PR process, not with open-source. From the article - > It's gotten so bad, GitHub added a feature to disable Pull Requests entirely. Pull Requests are the fundamental thing that made GitHub popular. And now we'll see that feature closed off in more and more repos. I don't have a solution for this, I'm pointing to the flaw in the assumption that AI is destroying open-source.
  • mycall 8mo ago
    The solution is forking. Make a fork, update it to your heart's content. If it is found to be solid later, perhaps it will be studied and forked itself.
    • JKCalhoun 8mo ago
      Yeah, been thinking that we should let the LLMs run riot on special AI branches— or heck, maybe Microsoft can buy/create AIGitHub.com.
      • foxglacier 8mo ago
        But that's already true. Github lets people make a fork and have their AI run riot on it. What are you really suggesting if not the status quo?
        • JKCalhoun 8mo ago
          That we embrace it generally. Even just proposing a naming convention would allow for agents to find the AI-sanctioned branch (or create it) and have at it. (Maybe some AI agents can collaborate on "AILinux" and we can see how it measures up, ha ha.)
          • foxglacier 8mo ago
            Maintainer could just say "No AI please" and refuse PRs that they judge are probably AI. The AI operator can figure out how to make a fork if that's what they want. But they probably don't want that, so no point anybody else creating a system that nobody wants and nobody will use.
• itypecode 8mo ago
  AI code review can be useful, but I always review the code it produces, coupled with intentional prompting with detailed tasks. > But I wouldn't run my production apps—that actually make money or could cause harm if they break—on unreviewed AI code. I hope no one is actually letting unreviewed code through. AI can, and _will_ make mistakes. Nowadays > 90% of my code tasks are handled by AI. I still review and guide it to produce what I intended to do myself.
• softwaredoug 8mo ago
  What if we choose to see this as an “always fork” open source ecosystem. I mean I don’t want you sending PRs to my vibe coded project, but I also don’t care if you fork it to make useful for your needs We’ve been so worried about the burden of forking in the past - maybe that should change?
• drob518 8mo ago
  > And they say "this time it's different", but it's not. It never is. You know you’ve hit peak bubble when everyone you know is investing in the new hotness and saying, “This time it’s different.” When that happens, get ready to short the market.
• brainless 8mo ago
  More people are jumping in because of the thrill of it. We are in the early days and I believe that things will get better as more people will calm the f down. People who have built things for ages will continue to do so, with or without coding agents. In the long term, I think Open Source will win. I can imagine content management systems, eCommerce software, CRM, etc. to all become coding agent friendly - customer can customize the core software with agents and the scaffold would provide fantastic guardrails. Self-hosting is already becoming way more popular than it ever was. People are downloading all sorts of tools to build software. Building is better. A structure needs to emerge.
• periodjet 8mo ago
  I enjoy letting the air out of hype bubbles as much as the next guy, but this kind of article is an example of the OTHER side of this particular undesirable coin: needless doomerism for the purposes of attention and virtue farming. Miss me with it.
  • foxglacier 8mo ago
    Yep. He's just repeating the same popular opinions you hear every day, and with just as much lack of reasoning and evidence to support them as every other AI doomer. He even has the same standard opinion of cryptocurrency that goes along with it. I suppose this sort of post acts as a summary of popular opinion but not as a source of useful ideas about the topic itself.
• devsda 8mo ago
  If not for the accomplishments, advancements and potential benefits, the whole AI story since LLMs looks a lot like sophisticated DDOS attack at multiple levels. AI bots are literally DDOS'ing servers. Adoption is consuming and making both physical and computing resources either inaccessible or expensive for almost everyone. The most significant one is the human cost. We suddenly found ourselves dealing with overwhelming levels of AI content/code/images/video that is mostly subpar. May be as AI matures we'll find it more easy and have better tools to work with the volume but for now it feels like it is coming from bad actors even when it is done by well meaning individuals. There's no doubt AI has its uses and it is here to stay but I guess we'll all have to struggle until we reach that point where it is a net benefit. The hype by those financially invested isn't helping a bit though.
  • ori_b 8mo ago
    AI is passive consumption cosplaying as productivity. Any place where humans have to do something is a bug in the product. Of course it's going to be damaging to places where people actually want to craft things.
    • Gud 8mo ago
      Ok, but I am using ChatGPT and Claude to develop usable products five times faster than if I had developed them myself.
      • squeefers 8mo ago
        ai is slop and thats the consensus here for some reason. even before looking at the code, it MUST be slop. its why i have no time for anyone harking on about the evils of social media (for kids and somehow not adults) yet telling me this on, guess what, social media.
        • Gud 8mo ago
          I don't understand your point and how it relates to my comment.
• amarant 8mo ago
  We need to have a catchier term for AI assisted coding, so that we may easily distinguish it from Vibe coding slop. Using AI to find relevant parts of a codebase, help you remember stuff like which annotations a data class needs for dB persistence(yes I'm a Java server dev, hi!) is awesome. Having Claude solo dev an application based on a prompt generated by gpt is something else entirely(pretty fun, but not very useful for anything more complicated than mega-trivial) Open claw is like the third level to this that also exists for some reason.
• benreesman 8mo ago
  Monetization destroyed open source. Agent code made the bankruptcy legible. Open source software was trivially better in the nineties because it was done by people who would have and often did do it for free. Those people are better by simp. The people bitching about it now didn't push back when it unified on a forge, or when it sold to Microsoft, or when it started working in like button stars. They're bitching now that their grift is up.
• ChicagoDave 8mo ago
  I actually think GenAI will create MORE open source code and as long as devs use quality controls like TDD and SonarQube the code will evolve into reusable works.
  • kristopolous 8mo ago
    I've never heard of sonarqube ... this looks very enterprisey ... isn't this just prompt engineering over the source with a harness? Why am I clicking through all this signup flow? I'd buy the put this in your ".git/hooks" workflow ... but I don't know what's going on with this thing. The strongest opensource contributors tend to be kinda weird - like they don't have a google account and use some kind of libre phone os that you've never heard of. What a "real" solution would look like is some kind of "guardrails" format where they can use an lsp or treesitter to give dos and donts and then have a secondary auditing llm punt the code back. There may be tools (coderabbit?) that do this ... but that's realistically what the solution will be - local llms, self-orchestrated.
    • ChicagoDave 8mo ago
      SonarQube does static analysis and let's you set your own levels. Yes, enterprises use it for code and test quality as well as security checks. I was just saying that good engineers can guide GenAI into creating good code bases. Seeing I got voted down, not everyone agrees.
      • kristopolous 8mo ago
        eh, it sounds like you're hawking your own product. It doesn't look like you are and this looks to be a mass adopted fortune-100 product without large brand name awareness, but that's the risk with hn. There's a lot of people trying to hustle their stuff on here. Strongly frowned upon unless it's genuinely free and even then... Maybe something like "at work we use something called sonarqube and I've been using it on my own stuff. it's works really nice" might have been better
        • 8mo ago
• VerifiedReports 8mo ago
  "a writer used hallucinated quotes" No; FABRICATED quotes. We have a perfectly good, correct word for what's going on.
  • cowboylowrez 8mo ago
    no, the word "fabricated" means a deliberate action which could quite possibly have negative connotations for the fabricator, "hallucinated" is something more, its fabrication laundered through an llm.
    • VerifiedReports 8mo ago
      Nope. It just means made-up... like your "definition." Or were you in a fugue state and hallucinating?
      • cowboylowrez 8mo ago
        i'm not a bot ur a bot
• maltalex 8mo ago
  It's not just open source though. Many high quality sources of information are being (over-)exploited and hurt in the process. StackOverflow is effectively dead [0], the internet archive is being shunned by publishers [1], scientific journals are bombarded by fake papers [2] (and anecdotally, low-effort LLM-driven reviews), projects like OpenStreetMap incur significant costs due to scraping [3], and many more. We went from data mining to data fracking. [0]: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-... [1]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-internet-archive-access-due-to-ai-scraping-concerns/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/news-publishers-limit-inte... [2]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/16/wiley_journals_ai/ [3]: https://www.heise.de/en/news/OpenStreetMap-is-concerned-thousands-of-AI-bots-are-collecting-data-11157359.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/OpenStreetMap-is-concerned-thou...
  • _aavaa_ 8mo ago
    StackOverflow was well on its way to death even without ChatGPT, just look at the graph from [0]. It has been in steady consistent decline since 2014 (minus a very transient blip from covid). Then the chagpt effect is a sudden drop in visitors. But the rate of decline after that looks more or less the same as pre-chatgpt.
    • silverwind 8mo ago
      StackOverflow was killed by its toxic moderators. I hope it stays online thought because it's massive source of knowledge, although in many cases outdated already.
      • foxglacier 8mo ago
        I always thought StackOverflow was meant to fizzle out over time as more questions get answered and don't need to be asked again. Perhaps the decline is just a necessary part of their rule of having no duplicate questions - keeping it as a clean repository of knowledge rather than a messy forum. Just the other day a question I asked about 10 years ago got flagged as a duplicate. It turns out somebody else had asked the same question several years later and got a better answer than my question got, so that other one is the canonical one and mine is pushed away. It feels kind of offensive but it makes complete sense if the goal is to provide useful answers to people searching.
• Arifcodes 8mo ago
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  • JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    > The issue isn't AI, it's effort asymmetry Effort asymmetry is inheret to AI's raison d'être. (One could argue that's true for most consumer-facing technology.) The problem is AI.
    • thierrydamiba 8mo ago
      I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot. I have a phrase that I’ve taken to using. Leverage Engineering. I think AI is going to create a whole new class of people that take a tiny output and turn it into an outsized output. When this works, it is really nice. Think Cursor, Lovable, or OpenClaw. When it doesn’t work though, things get ugly too. The same power that allows a small team to build a billion dollar company also allows rouge agents to industrialize their efforts as well. Combine this with the rise of headless browsers and you have a dangerous cocktail. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see regulation or licensing around frontier AI APIs in the near future.
      • squeefers 8mo ago
        > I think AI is going to create a whole new class of people that take a tiny output and turn it into an outsized output. and thats a problem because? you know people said very similar things about digital music and synthesizers.... "anyone can make music with a synthesizer, so it will make music less special", but were still waiting for music to decay away because its easier than it used to be.
        • JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
          To be fair, I didn’t see parent criticizing it. Just observing.
          • 8mo ago
• cagz 8mo ago
  Low-quality AI-created PRs that are submitted to open-source repositories are prompted by humans. And those are the same humans who fails to review AI's output properly before submitting (or letting AI submit) as PRs. Let's not blame the tools instead of bad workmanship. A smaller number of PRs generated by OpenClaw-type bots are also doing so based on their owner's direct or implied instructions. I mean, someone is giving them GitHub credentials and letting them loose. AI is also allowing the creation of many new open-source projects, led by responsible developers. Given the exponential speed at which AI is progressing, surely the quality of such PRs is going to improve. But there are also opportunities for the open-source community to improve their response. It will sound controversial, but AI can be used to perform an initial review of PRs, suggest improvements, and, in extreme cases, reject them.
• dennysora 8mo ago
  I’m genuinely unsure how to assess the current state of open source. Many projects have been AI-assisted in one way or another. Meanwhile, a large number of people use AI to generate code indiscriminately and publish it as open source. As a result, using open-source contributions as a proxy for someone’s engineering ability has become increasingly unreliable. In addition, many developers now prefer to build their own solutions rather than rely on whether an open-source alternative exists. And for many small open-source projects, frankly, I hesitate to use them—given how prevalent malicious software has become, if it’s feasible to build it in-house, I’d rather do that.
• JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > GitHub added a feature to disable Pull Requests entirely. Pull Requests are the fundamental thing that made GitHub popular There is a temporary solution. Let maintainers limit PRs to accounts that were created prior to November 30 2022 [1]. These are known-human accounts. Down the road, one can police for account transfers and create a system where known-human accounts in good standing can vouch for newer accounts. But for now that should staunch the bleeding. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT
  • lacunary 8mo ago
    I've heard that what have to in the past been called spammers create large numbers of fake accounts and then sit on them for years, just to bypass these types of schemes. I guess you could augment with checking for some level of human-like activity before that date.
• overgard 8mo ago
  Unintentionally mean sounding statement but... From my observation, the people that are the most excited about AI are low skilled/unskilled people in that domain. If said people treated AI as a learning tool, everything would be great (I think AI can be a really effective teacher if you're truly motivated to learn). The problem is those people think they "now have the skill", even though they don't. They essentially become walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect (the cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge or competence in a particular domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence) The problem with being able to produce an artifact that superficially looks like a good product, without the struggle that comes with true learning, is you miss out on all the supporting knowledge that you actually need to judge the quality of the output and fix it, or even the taste to be able to guide the agent in good patterns vs poor patterns. I'd encourage people that are obsessed with cutting edge AI and running 5000 Claude agents simultaneously to vibe code a website to take a step back and use the AI to teach them fundamentals. Because if all you can do is prompt, you're useless.
  • cowboylowrez 8mo ago
    >I think AI can be a really effective teacher if you're truly motivated to learn This! I use simple freebie gemini queries and actually read the code produced because thats the actual intent of me asking gemini a question. Now that doesn't mean that I mind folks running these vibe coding agents and I bet in the hands of an invested individual aware of risks, some percent of those agents could be tests on results, "devils advocates" type things, like "search for security problems in this code", "break into this system" etc, don't get me wrong I haven't ever actually used agents so my assumptions of what they can do are probably pretty naive lol but theres no denying that neural networks aren't going anywhere. My biggest problem with this seem to be slanted more toward the messed up economics and politics of it all which is really just the usual clueless people encountering and using tech from the clued people with a dash of actually psychopathy tossed in for that extra spicy spicy hit. Witness my favorite bad guys suggesting an actual ban on states issuing regulations regarding AI, and then when I see the money being borrowed and the ramifications of budgets required to repay them etc and the fraud, social media AI slop and actual deceptive possiblities that are most certainly being used, well its just all so tiresome
• wqtz 8mo ago
  I do not understand what bubble even means, and I do not think the developer influencers do either. Was NFT or Crypto a bubble? The idea of a bubble means that it "pops" in a dramatic fashion. NFT prices in aggregate faded slowly, and the impact it has only applies to a handful of individuals. Moreover, the behavior we have seen with crypto and nft can largely be speculated that the purpose was largely illicit financial engineering. If a handful of bad PRs "are destroying open source," Open Source as a concept is surprisingly in a vulnerable project. No project worth its salt ever integrates unverifiable PRs. No valid OSS ever integrates uninvited PRs in the first place. Every PR is driven by an issue or a very robust that is specific description. Any project that receives an "unsolicited" PR does not make the project maintainer yell "Oh, I am ruined." I have stopped checking out these programming content videos for the last year or so. But I stupidly did it here. Every single channel has become like Coffeezilla with an agenda, being AI as a catalyst of great harm.
  • mcphage 8mo ago
    > Open Source as a concept is surprisingly in a vulnerable project Yes, that’s been a known problem for a while. This comic: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/ is a popular illustration of the problem from 2020, but the problem itself was well known before that.
• EZ-E 8mo ago
  Maybe some type of reputation system could help. ie: "karma" but for github. Increases whenever you make good contributions that get merged, decreased if you submit slop that gets rejected.
  • zzo38computer 8mo ago
    One problem with it is that a good contribution might be used even if it cannot be merged directly for whatever reason (although they might be listed as a co-author in that case).
• KnuthIsGod 8mo ago
  Science fiction magazines like Clarkesworld are being innundated with really terrible AI generated stories.
• jockm 8mo ago
  I am curious, do we have any confirmation that the "AI hit piece" thing is real? It feels like everyone is just assuming it is, but it would be nice to see some confirmation. Additionally Geerling raises good points, but I am not sure we should jump to his conclusion yet.
• kittbuilds 8mo ago
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• Razengan 8mo ago
  If you see my previous comments on the matter I absolutely don't trust AI for generating any code, but in the past couple days I've come to appreciate it for reviewing code. I'm the sole maintainer for a gamedev "middleware" open source project for Godot, and all AIs have been generally crap about Godot stuff and frequently getting it wrong, but Codex helped me catch some future bugs that could have caused hard to spot mysterious behavior and a lot of head scratching. I don't dare let it edit anything but I look at its suggestions and implement them my way. Of course it's still wrong sometimes, if I trusted it blindly I would be f'ed. A few times I had to repeatedly tell it about how some of its findings were incorrect or the intended behavior, until it relented with "You're right. My assumption was based on..." Also, while I would [probably] never let AI be the source of any of my core code, it's nice for experiments and what-ifs: since my project is basically a library of more-or-less standalone components, it's actually more favorable for AI, to wire them together like prebuilt Lego blocks: I can tell it to "make a simple [gameplay genre] scene using existing components only, do not edit any code" and it lets me spot what's missing from the library. In the end this too is a tool like everything else. I've always wanted to make games but I've always been sidetracked by "black hole" projects like trying to make engines and frameworks without ever actually making an actual full game, and I think it's time to welcome anything that helps me waste less time on the stuff that isn't an actual game :)
• notepad0x90 8mo ago
  This is largely reactionary and false on both counts. AI has been good for years now. Good doesn't mean perfect. it doesn't mean flawless. It doesn't mean the hype is spot-on. good means exactly that, it is good at what is intended to do. It is not destroying open source either. If anything, there would be more open source contributors using AI to create code. You can call anything done by AI "slop" but that doesn't make it so. Daniel and the curl project were also over reacting. A reaction was warranted, but there were many measures they could have taken before shutting down bug reporting entirely. If you replace "AI" with "junior dev", "troll" , "spammer", what would things be like then? If it is scale, you can troll, spam and be incompetent at scale just fine without the help of AI. It's gatekeeping and sentimentality amplified. I can't wait for people who call everything slop to be overshadowed by people who are so used to LLMs that their usage isn't different than using a linter, a compiler, an IDE, just another tool good at certain tasks but not others. abusable, but with reasonable mitigations possible. I keep reading posts about what open source users are owed and not owed. Github restricting PRs, developers complaining about burnouts. Have you considered using AI "slop" instead? give a slop response to what you consider to be a slop request? Oh, but no, you could never touch "AI", that would stain you! (I speak to the over-reactors). You don't need AI, you could do anything AI can do (except AI doesn't complain about it all the time, or demand clout). What is the largest bottleneck and hinderance to open source adaption? Money? No, many, including myself are willing to spend for it. I've even lucked out trying to pay an open source project maintainer to support their software. It's always support. Support means triaging bugs, and feature requests in a timely manner. You know what helps with that a lot? A tool that understand code generation and troubleshooting well, along with natural language processing. A bot that can read what people are requesting, and give them feedback until their reports meet a certain criteria of acceptability, so you as a developer don't have to deal with the tiring back and forth with them. that same tool can generate code in feature branches. fix people's PR's so it meets your standards and priorities. highlight changes and how they affect your branch, prioritize them for you, so you can spend minimal time reviewing code and accepting or rejecting PRs. If that isn't good for open source then what is? Bad attitude towards AI is destroying open source projects led by people entrenched in an all-or-nothing false dichotomy mindset against AI. And AI itself is good. not great, not replace-humans-great, but good enough for it's intended use. great with cooperative humans in the decision making loop. Use the best tool for the task! that should be like #2 in the developer rule book, with #1 being: It needs to work.
• deafpolygon 8mo ago
  Most of LLMs (“AI”) is trained on our public code. Including the bad ones. It’s not cleverly generating new code; it’s just re-arranging code that it’s already seen. So, naturally, its usefulness is starting to plateau. The bulk of the improvements we’ll see from here on out will be better adaptability to specific applications. It’s not destroying open source — but rather, making it accessible to everyone. That includes those that don’t understand it and people who have never had to go through the hazing that OSS culture tends to put newly inducted members through (“rtfm”, “benevolent dictators”, what have you, etc). So without that culture of exclusive membership (by hazing), oss is now overwhelmed. It’s going to take time for the dust to settle from the stampede, and what’s left will be those who care about the craft and the art of software development. I liken it to what photography did to art, and how art has shifted. One thing that LLMs will be really great for is accelerating learning. It’s now possible to tailor the output to suit individual needs even greater than before. I’m rather excited to see the possibilities of LLMs in the education space.
• fraaancis 8mo ago
  In the problem is the solution. Open source maintainers start writing AGENTS.md and other files to guide those using LLMs, and future nerd sniping and elitism can be practiced in reference to the spec instead of the actual code. There can just be an agent template for maintaining or adding features to curl or projects like it.
• yoasif_ 8mo ago
  I also commented on this: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/12/17/AIs-unpaid-debt-how-llm-scrapers-destroy-the-social-contract-of-open-source.html https://www.quippd.com/writing/2025/12/17/AIs-unpaid-debt-ho...