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Coding agents could make free software matter again
- maxbeech 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- floathub 6mo agoFree software has never mattered more. All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source. Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago> All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source. Exactly. > Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc. It wouldn't even work. It's constantly using those. I remember reading a Claude Code CLI install doc and the first thing was "we need ripgrep" with zero shame. All these tools also all basically run on top of Linux: with Claude Code actually installing, on Windows and MacOS, a full linux VM on the system. It's all open-source command line tools, an open-source OS and piping program one to the other. I'm on Linux on the desktop (and servers ofc) since the Slackware days... And I was right all along.
- gesis 6mo agoThe primary selling point of unix and unix-like operating systems has always been composability. Without the ability to string together the basic utilities into a much greater sum, Unix would have been another blip.
- CobrastanJorji 6mo agoIt's not just that open source code is useful in an age of AI, it's that the AI could only have been made because of the open source code.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- andoando 6mo agoWhy isnt LLM training itself open sourced? With all the compute in the world, something like Folding@home here would be killer
- DesaiAshu 6mo agodata bandwidth limits distributed training under current architectures. really interesting implications if we can make progress on that
- dogcomplex 6mo agoLimits but doesn't prohibit. See https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-3 https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-3 - still useful and can scale enormously. Takes a particular shape and relies heavily on RL, but still big.
- andoando 6mo agoWhat bandwith limits? Im assuming the forward and backward passes have to be done sequentially?
- DesaiAshu 6mo agoYes also passing data within each layer
- throwaway27448 6mo agoIt's either illegal or extremely expensive to source quality training material.
- m4rtink 6mo agoYeah, turns out if you want to train a model without scrapping and overloading the whole of Internet while ignoring all the licenses and basic decency is actually hard & expensive!
- mike_hearn 6mo ago
- PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago> Free software has never mattered more. But the Libre part of Free Software has never mattered less, at least so TFA argues and while I could niggle with the point, it's not wrong.
- pwdisswordfishy 6mo agoWow, some corps could offload some of their costs to "the community" (unpair labor), while end users are as disenfranchised as ever! How validating!
- threethirtytwo 6mo agoI think the opposite. It will make all software matter less. If trendlines continue... It will be faster for AI to vibe code said software to your customized specifications than to sign up for a SaaS and learn it. "Claude, create a project management tool that simplifies jira, customize it to my workflow." So a lot of apps will actually become closed source personalized builds.
- SchemaLoad 6mo agoAnd then you get a new hire who already knows the common SaaS products but has to re learn your vibe coded version no one else uses where no information exists online. There is a reason why large proprietary products remain prevalent even when cheaper better alternatives exist. Being "industry standard" matters more than being the best.
- ares623 6mo agoAs the kids say: "let them cook"
- threethirtytwo 6mo agoThe new hire will just vibe code a new solution that translates your solution into something he prefers. Every new hire will have his own.
- SchemaLoad 6mo agoThis will all end well I'm sure
- threethirtytwo 6mo agoIt will. By translation I mean like a front end client that translates the api into a user interface they prefer. They will build something localized to their own workflow. If it doesn't end well it's localized to them only.
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- pdntspa 6mo agoWhat's the chance this website is powered by postgresql?
- SchemaLoad 6mo agoMaybe, but I don't really believe users can or want to start designing software, if it was even possible which today it isn't really unless you already have software dev skills. That would basically make users a product manager and UX designer, which they aren't really capable of currently. At most they will discover what they think they want isn't what they actually want.
- Bockit 6mo agoIt’s such a fun time to have 1+ decade(s) of experience in software. Knowing what simple and good are (for me), and being able to articulate it has let me create so much personal software for myself and my family. It has really felt like turning ideas into reality, about as fast as I can think of them or they can suggest them. And adding specific features, just for our needs. The latest one was a slack canvas replacement, as we moved from slack to self-hosted matrix + element but missed the multiplayer, persistent monthly notes file we used. Even getting matrix set up in the first place was a breeze. $20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot. Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.
- Crye 6mo agoCouldn't agree more. I'm building open source software for the grid, contributing in a way that feels like it could truly make a difference, while building momentum for open standards. It doesn't feel like work, just creativity and problem solving. On top of that, I can just build stuff for fun. Kids want a Minecraft mod? Let's build it and learn a thing or two on the way.
- wickedsight 6mo agoWhere/how do you host your family apps to have them conveniently available to your household? This is the thing I'm struggling with most.
- Bockit 6mo agoI have a Mac mini and I put every device that needs access on Tailscale
- rkuykendall-com 6mo agoI have a Synology NAS I can push docker images to. The key is to set up the docker image so it does a git pull on start, that way I just push to Github and restart it. This was _incredibly_ hard to set up, in a way I did not expect, even with frontier models. It took me 3-4 evenings. If someone can solve "Heroku for home server" it would open up a world of what HackerNews calls "home cooked" software.
- vicchenai 6mo ago[flagged]
- SchemaLoad 6mo agoThis feels like an AI generated comment, but I'll reply anyway. AI has been a massive negative for open source since every project is now drowning in AI generated PRs which don't work, reports for issues which don't exist, and the general mountain of time waster automated slop. We are getting to the point where many projects may have to close submissions from the general public since they waste far more time than they help.
- wiseowise 6mo agoYou couldn’t even bother to write this shite by hand?
- heliumtera 6mo agoOh yeah, sure, nothing scream freedom louder than following anthropic and openai suggestions without a second thought.
- 2790276 6mo ago[dead]
- FergusArgyll 6mo agotl-didn't finish but I absolutely do this already. Much of the software I use is foss and codex adjusts it to my needs. Sometimes it's really good software and I end up adding something that already exists. Whatever, tokens are free...
- woeirua 6mo agoI’m not so sure… what I see as more likely is that coding agents will just strip parts from open source libraries to build bespoke applications for users. Users will be ecstatic because they get exactly what they want and they don’t have to worry about upstream supply chain attacks. Maintainers get screwed because no one contributes back to the main code base. In the end open source software becomes critical to the ecosystem, but gets none of the credit.
- sigbottle 6mo agoBut the users would have to maintain their own forks then. Unless you stream back patches into your forks, which implies there's some upstream being maintained. Software doesn't interoperate and maintain itself for free - somebody's gotta put in the time for that. I think as long as AI isn't literal AGI, social pressures will keep projects alive, in some state. There definitely is something scary about stealing entire products as a mean for new market domination - e.g. steal linux then make a corporate linux, and force everybody to contribute to corporate linux only (many linux contributors are paid by corporations, after all), and make that the new central pointer. That might be worst case scenario - then Microsoft, in collusion (which I admit is far fetched, but def possible), could completely adopt linux for servers and headless compute, and enforce very strict hardware restrictions such that only Windows works.
- LegionMammal978 6mo ago> But the users would have to maintain their own forks then. I suppose the idea would be, they don't have to maintain it: if it ever starts to rot from whatever environmental changes, then they can just get the LLM to patch it, or at worst, generate it again from scratch. (And personally, I prefer writing code so that it isn't coupled so tightly to the environment or other people's fast-moving libraries to begin with, since I don't want to poke at all of my projects every other year just to keep them functional.)
- sigbottle 6mo agoThe LLM can a priori test on all possible software and hardware environments, test all possible edge cases for deployment, get feedback from millions of eyes on the project explicitly or implicitly via bug reports and usage, find good general case use features given the massive amounts of data gathered through the community of where the project needs to go next, etc? Even in a world with pure LLM coding, it's more likely that LLMs maintain an open source place for other LLMs to contribute to. You're forgetting that code isn't just a technical problem (well, even if it was, that would be a wild claim that goes against all hardness results known to humans given the limits of a priori reasoning...)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- apatheticonion 6mo agoHaving over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim. I wish I could be provided a dividend or royalty, however small, for my contribution to these LLMs but that will never happen. I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that. I'm guessing that such a license would not be enforceable because I am not in the US, but at least it would be nice to declare my intent and who knows what the future looks like.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that Frankly do you think AI companies have even the remotest amount of respect for these licenses anyways? They will simply take your code if it is publicly scrapeable, train their models, exactly like they have so far. Then it will be up to you to chase them down and try to sue or whatever. And good luck proving the license violation I dunno. I just don't really believe that many tech companies these days are behaving even remotely ethically. I don't have much hope that will change anytime soon
- apatheticonion 6mo agoI wonder if there is a "loaded" lawsuit here that could be a win-win for license enforcement case law in LLMs. Take a litigious company like Nintendo. If one was to train an LLM on their works and the LLM produces an emulator, that would force a lawsuit. If Nintendo wins, then LLMs are stealing. If Nintendo loses, then we can decompile everything.
- leandro-person 6mo agoI’m impressed by how current times make us consider so many completely opposite scenarios. I think it can indeed foster progress, but it can also have negative impacts.
- clawfund 6mo ago[flagged]
- jongjong 6mo agoUnfortunately for me, I believe that the algorithms won't allow me to get exposure for my work no matter how good it is so there is literally no benefit for me to do open source. Though I would love to, I'm not in a position to work for free. Exposure is required to monetize open source. It has to reach a certain scale of adoption. The worst part is building something open source, getting positive feedback, helping a couple of startups and then some big corporation comes along and implements a similar product and then everyone gets forced by their bosses to use the corporate product against their will and people eventually forget your product exists because there are no high-paying jobs allowing people to use it. With hindsight, Open Source is basically a con for corporations to get free labor. When you make software free for everyone, really you're just making it free for corporations to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... They invest a huge amount of effort to suppress the sources of the ideas. Our entire system is heavily optimized for decoupling products from their makers. We have almost no idea who is making any of the products we buy. I believe there is a reason for that. Open source is no different. When we lived in caves, everyone in the tribe knew who caught the fish or who speared the buffalo. They would rightly get credit. Now, it's like; because none of the rich people are doing any useful work, they can only maintain credibility by obfuscating the source of the products we buy. They do nothing but control stuff. Controlling stuff does not add value. Once a process is organized, additional control only serves to destroy value through rent extraction.
- theturtletalks 6mo ago5 years ago, I set out to build an open-source, interoperable marketplace powered by open-source SaaS. It felt like a pipe dream, but AI has made the dream into fruition. People are underestimating how much AI is a threat to rent seeking middlemen in every industry.
- try-working 6mo agoYou never get rid of the middleman. You become them.
- theturtletalks 6mo agoIf that middleman is open-source and simply interops with SaaS that itself is open-source, there simply is no moat to exploit.
- we4a 6mo agoFirst of all, free software still matters. Then, being a slave to a $200 subscription to a oligarch application that launders other people's copyright is not what Stallman envisioned. The AI propaganda articles are getting more devious my the minute. It's not just propaganda---it's Bernays-level manipulation!
- nunez 6mo agoGaslighting as a Service
- throwaw12 6mo ago> SaaS scaled by exploiting a licensing loophole that let vendors avoid sharing their modifications. AI is going to exploit even more: "Given the repository -> Construct tech spec -> Build project based on tech spec" At this stage, I want everyone just close their source, stop working on open source until this issue of licensing gets resolved. Any improvement you make to the open source code will be leveraged in ways you didn't intend it to be used, eventually making you redundant in the process
- dannersy 6mo agoEven worse, the AI will supply a mediocre version of the source specific to someone else's case, and not getting anything in return, ultimately choking the open source effort. The article touches on this briefly. All I post anymore is anti-AI sentiment because it just feels like we're in a cycle of blind trust. A lot of FOSS seems cautious about LLMs for a plethora of reasons (quality and ethics among those) but we're a long way from making the tools that are supposedly going to replace us a locally runnable tool. So, until then, we're conceding pur agency to Anthropic and whoever else. Meanwhile, war is breaking out and disrupting already stressed supply chains and manufacturing (for instance, Taiwan relies heavily on natural gas). Many manufacturers are starting to ditch production of consumer hardware, the supposed hardware folks ITT want to run their local models on. The vast majority of datacenters aren't being built yet, and those that are being built are missing their targets, still have aging GPUs in boxes without the infrastructure to power and turn them on, all while floating hundreds of billions in debt. Surely I can't be the only one who sees the issues here? Each topic is hours of "what ifs" and a massive gamble to see if any of it will come together in a way that will be good for anyone who visits HN.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- zephen 6mo agoThe article makes zero sense to me. It compares and contrasts open source and free software, and then gives an example of how free software is better than closed software. But if the premise of the article, that the agent will take the package you pick and adapt it to your needs, is correct, then honestly the agent won't give a rat's ass whether the starting point was free source or open source.
- agentultra 6mo agoI think it will wall people off from software. I don’t know what SaaS has to do with FOSS. The point of FOSS was to allow me to modify the software I run on my system. If the device drivers for some hardware I depend on are no longer supported by the company I bought it from, if it’s open source, I can modify and extend the software myself. The Copy Left licenses ensure that I share my modifications back if I distribute them. It’s a thing for the public good. Agent-based software development walls people off from that. Mostly by ensuring that the provenance of the code it generates is not known and by deskilling people so that they don’t know what to prompt or how to fix their code.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- MeetRickAI 6mo ago[flagged]
- est31 6mo agoIf I look around in the FLOSS communities, I see a lot of skepticism towards LLMs. The main concerns are: 1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos 2. the best models are proprietary 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going to go away. Much more powerful lobbies than the OSS ones are losing fights against the LLM companies (the big copyright holders in media). But while companies can use LLMs to build replacements for GPL licensed code (where those LLMs have that GPL code probably in their training set), the reverse thing can also be done: one can break monopolies open using LLMs, and build so much open source software using LLMs. In the end, the GPL is only a means to an end.
- giancarlostoro 6mo ago> 3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc). Meanwhile as people sleep on LLMs to help them audit their code for security holes, or even any security code auditing tools. Script kiddies don't care that you think AI isn't ready, they'll use AI models to scrape your website for security gaps. They'll use LLMs to figure out how to hack your employees and steal your data. We already saw that hackers broke into government servers for the Mexican government, basically scraping every document of every Mexican citizen. Now is the time to start investing in security auditing, before you become the next news headline. AI isn't the future, it's already here, and hackers will use it against you.
- 2790276 6mo ago[dead]
- 59nadir 6mo agoThis reads like a "You wouldn't download a car!" ad but it's trying to scare you into using AI instead.
- giancarlostoro 6mo ago
- elif 6mo agoagree completely. When the megacorps are building hundreds of datacenters and openly talking about plans to charge for software "like a utility," there has never been a clearer mandate for the need for FOSS, and IMO there has never been as much momentum behind it either. these are exciting times, that are coming despite any pessimism rooted in our out-dated software paradigms.
- phendrenad2 6mo agoThe debate in the comment section here really boils down to: upstream freedom vs downstream freedom. Copyleft licenses like GPL/Apache mandate upstream freedom: Upstream has the "freedom" to use anything downstream, including anything written by a corporation. Non-copyleft FOSS licenses like MIT/BSD are about downstream freedom, which is more of a philosophically utilitarian view, where anyone who receives the software is free to use it however they want, including not giving their changes back to the community, on the assumption that this maximizes the utility of this free software in the world. If you prioritize the former goal, then coding agents are a huge problem for you. If the latter, then coding agents are the best thing ever, because they give everyone access to an effectively unlimited amount of cheap code.
- tmtvl 6mo agoWhat you call 'downstream freedom' isn't very downstream. The real downstream is the end user, who should have the right to know what the software is doing on their computer, to recompile the software so it works on their machine with the software that is already on it, to make changes to the software so it can serve their needs.
- phendrenad2 6mo agoRight, well, I'm using the word "downstream" for lack of a more precise term. I'm NOT using the "normal" open-source definition of "downstream". Does that help clarify what I mean?
- jaynate 6mo ago“Their relationship with the software is one of pure dependency, and when the software doesn’t do what they need, they just… live with it” Or, more likely, they churn off the product. The SaaS platforms that will survive are busy RIGHT NOW revamping their APIs, implementing oauth, and generally reorganizing their products to be discovered and manipulated by agents. Failing in this effort will ultimately result in the demise of any given platform. This goes for larger SaaS companies, too, it’ll just take longer.
- jaynate 6mo agoAnd I think it’s less about letting agents modify the product source. That’s more of a platform capability which should also be a requirement for certain types of use cases. All comes back to listening to and / or innovating for customers.
- ryguz 6mo ago[dead]
- bustah 6mo ago[flagged]
- bustah 6mo ago[flagged]
- lowsong 6mo agoI worry people are lacking context about how SaaS products are purchased if they think LLMs and "vibe coding" are going to replace them. It's almost never the feature set. Often it's capex vs opex budgeting (i.e., it's easier to get approval for a monthly cost than a upfront capital cost) but the biggest one is liability. Companies buy these contracts for support and to have a throat to choke if things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much you pay your AI vendor, if you use their product to "vibe code" a SaaS replacement and it fails in some way and you lose a bunch of money/time/customers/reputation/whatever, then that's on you. This is as much a political consideration as a financial one. If you're a C-suite and you let your staff make something (LLM generated or not) and it gets compromised then you're the one who signed off on the risky project and it's your ass on the line. If you buy a big established SaaS, do your compliance due-diligence (SOC2, ISO27001, etc.), and they get compromised then you were just following best practice. Coding agents don't change this. The truth is that the people making the choice about what to buy or build are usually not the people using the end result. If someone down the food chain had to spend a bunch of time with "brittle hacks" to make their workflow work, they're not going to care at all. All they want is the minimum possible to meet whatever the requirement is, that isn't going to come back to bite them later. SaaS isn't about software, it's about shifting blame.
- zar1048576 6mo agoI wonder if there will be a different phenomena — namely everyone just developing their own personal version of what they want rather than relying on what someone else built. Nowadays, if the core functionality is straightforward enough, I find that I just end up building it myself so I can tailor it to my exact needs. It takes less time than trying to understand and adapt someone else’s code base, especially if it’s (mostly) AI generated and contains a great deal of code slop.
- Mengkudulangsat 6mo agoThis has been my experience as a newbie. My prompts to Claude has evolved from "what program / data source do I need to do this" to "what program / data source do I need, to make you do this for me". After a few iterations, any data source without a free API feed, or any program without a free CLI interface are edited out of the gene pool, so to speak.
- peaklineops 6mo ago[dead]
- jongjong 6mo agoWhat I'm hoping for is for more competition in the tech sector. I'm tired of companies foisting Microsoft or Oracle products on everyone! WTF! The current tech sector feels like all companies are subsidiaries of Big Tech... It's likely a direct result of passive investing... Everyone who has any money and controls a small or medium sized company likely owns stock of Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon... So they mandate their companies to use products from those big tech companies. So all the small-fish founders feel like they are dogfooding their own investments... And that's preventing new entrants from getting a foothold in B2B space... Feels like all the small companies are working for Big Tech. Conflict of interests is the norm. It should be illegal for a company founder or director to own stock of a supplier. It should be illegal for shareholders to own stocks of two competing companies. Index funds should be illegal.
- Grokify 6mo agoOpen source has never been more alive for me. I have been publishing low key for years, and AI has expanded that capability more than 100 fold, in all directions. I had previously published packages in multiple languages but recently started to cut back to just one manually. But now with AI, I started to expand languages again. Instead of feeling constrained by toolchains I feel comfortable with, I feel freedom to publish more and more. The benefits to publishing AI generated code as open source are immense including code hosting and CI/CD pipelines for build, test, lint, security scans, etc. In additional to CI/CD pipelines, my repos have commits authored by Claude, Dependabot, GitHub Advanced Security Bot, Copilot, etc. All of this makes the code more reliable and maintainable, for both human and AI authored code. Some thoughts on two recent posts: 1. 90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47521157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47521157): I'm generally too busy to publishing code to promote, but at some time it might settle down. Additionally, with how fast AI can generate and refactor code, it can take some time before the code is stable enough to promote. 2. So where are all the AI apps? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503006): They are in GitHub with <2 stars! They are there but without promotion it takes a while to get started in popularity. That being said, I'm starting to get some PRs.
- As1287 6mo agoSo we'll have 100 2-star repositories per software developer containing stolen code and that is somehow a good thing? It is completely delusional that these copied "works" will have any effect or be used by anyone but the most rabid AI proponents just to make a point.
- Grokify 6mo agoIf there's any stolen code generated by AI, it's certainly not intentional and a DMCA notice would be appreciated. It would be interesting to see how prevalent this is in AI generated code - is anyone doing a study? Stars will likely go up over time, but more than the stars it's the testing and maintenance over time that's valuable. There's little promotion right now, but there are already some stars, PRs, and issues. In fact, I'm working on merging PRs now.
- imta71770 6mo ago[flagged]
- vpribish 6mo agoright. because free software stopped mattering. what an asshole headline
- steffs 6mo ago[dead]
- wontopos 6mo ago[dead]
- anilgulecha 6mo agoFOSS is dead - long live, FOSS. FOSS came up around the core idea of liberating software for hardware, and later on was sustained by the idea of a commodity of commons we can build on. But with LLMs we have alternative pathways/enablement for the freedoms: Freedom 0 (Run): LLMs troubleshoot environments and guide installations, making software executable for anyone. Freedom 1 (Study/Change): make modifications, including lowering bar of technical knowledge. Freedom 2 (Redistribute): LLMs force redistribution by building specs and reimplementing if needed. Freedom 3 (Improve/Distribute): Everyone gets the improvement they want. As we can see LLM makes these freedoms more democratic, beyond pure technical capability. For those that cared only about these 4 freedoms, LLMs enable these in spades. But those who looked additionally for business, signalling and community values of free software (I include myself in this), these were not guaranteed by FOSS, and we find ourselves figuring out how to make up for these losses.
- visarga 6mo agoI've been saying LLMs are more open than open source for some time...
- wise0wl 6mo agoI have to disagree. LLMs have shown that the only way to participate in the new software ecosystem are through leveraging an extremely powerful position that is create, backed, and maintained through the exploitation of capital, labor, and power (political, legal, corpotate) at levels never really seen before. The model of the Cathedral and the Bazaar was not broken by LLMs but instead the entire ecosystem was changed. Now the software doesn't matter. The code doesn't matter. The hardware doesn't matter. Anyone can generate anything for anything, as long as they pay the fee. I think it can likely be argued that participation is now gated more than ever and will require usage of an LLM to keep up and maintain some kind of competition or even meager parity. Open weight models are not really a means of crossing the moat; none of the open weight models come close to the functionality, and all of them come from the same types of corporations that are releasing their models for unspecified reasons. The fact remains that the moat created by LLMs for open source software has never been larger.
- anvevoice 6mo ago[dead]
- panny 6mo ago>agents don’t leave I think Pete Hegseth would disagree with this statement.
- wewewedxfgdf 6mo ago[dead]
- winna 6mo ago[dead]
- minsung0830 6mo ago[flagged]
- Grokify 6mo agoI've found that for API integration, developing against a spec, like OpenAPI, and using/building an auto-generated SDK is still very useful for coding agents. When there is no spec for REST APIs, I built a tool that can convert HAR files, Postman collections and other data to OpenAPI spec from which I build client SDKs for coding agents to use.
- wei03288 6mo ago[dead]
- leptons 6mo agoIf most of the "free software" is AI slop, then it's going to make me read a lot more source code for free software, if the free software is also open-source. If it isn't open-source, oh boy, no way. AI backdoors are already a well known problem, and vibe-coded free software is always going to present a substantial risk. We'll see how it plays out in time, but I can already see where it's heading. After enough problems, reputation and humans in the loop could finally become important again. But I have a feeling humanity is going to have to learn the hard way first (again).
- getverdict 6mo ago[dead]
- shardullavekar 6mo agois someone building an agent to manage self hosted infra? A lot of "convenience" issues around self hosting free software would go away.
- techpulselab 6mo ago[flagged]
- wolvesechoes 6mo agoThey could, but they won't.
- the_gipsy 6mo agoCorrect headline, wrong reasons. Free software will continue to be the software that nerds write and share openly because they just like doing that. Some kind of artisan "proper" quality work, compared to cheap enterprise AI slop.
- peaklineops 6mo ago[dead]
- cyberclimb 6mo ago> Why does this matter? Because the “open source” rebrand wasn’t just a marketing change — it was a philosophical amputation. I cringe whenever I see such an AI generated sentence and unfortunately it devalues the article
- Towaway69 6mo agoA question I have for those doing Agentic coding - what is the development process used? How are agents organised? Top down with a "manager" agent telling "coding" agents what to do? I.e. mirroring the existing corporate interpretation of "agile"/scrum development. I was thinking and seeing the title of this article, it would be interesting to setup a agent environment that mirrors a typical open source project involving a discussion forum (where features are thrown around) and a github issue/PR (where implementation details are discussed) and then have a set of agents that are "mergers" - acting as final review instances. I assume that agents can be organised in any form at all, it's just a matter of setting up the system prompt and then letting them go for it. A discourse forum could be set up where agents track the feature requests of users of the software and then discuss how to implement it or how to workaround it. The reason I ask is because one could then do a direct comparison of development processes, i.e. the open source model versus the corporate top-down process. It would interest me to see which process performance better in terms of maintainability, quality and feature richness.
- BlueTemplar 6mo ago> a free software license alone does not empower users to be truly free if they lack the expertise to exercise those freedoms This is a bullshit argument, and I'm surprised that people aware enough of these issues would try to push it. Closed (or online-only) software prevents not only the end user from modifying it, but also 'unlicensed' hackers that the end user can ask for help. See the "right to repair" movement as a very close example. The possibility of an 'ecosystem' of middlemen like these, matters !
- dabedee 6mo agoThis is an interesting take. I think a critical missing piece from this article is how the use of coding agents will essentially enable the circumvention of copyleft licenses. Some project that was recently posted on HN is already selling this service [1][2]. It rewrites code/modules/projects to less restrictive licenses with no legal enforcement mechanisms. It's the opposite of freeing code. [1] Malus.sh ; Initially a joke but, in the end, not. You can actually pay for their service. [2] Your new code is delivered under the MalusCorp-0 License—a proprietary-friendly license with zero attribution requirements, zero copyleft, and zero obligations.
- GorbachevyChase 6mo agoWhy would you pay for their service when an AI agent can reproduce that for you? If you’re vibecoding SaaS, you’re not going to make it.
- bmitch3020 6mo agoThis article misses the point completely. Open source isn't great because it's easy to extract value from it. Open source is great because of the people creating value with it. Value isn't just slapping a license on something and pushing to GitHub. It's maintaining and curating that software over years, focusing the development towards a goal. It's as much telling users what features you're not willing to add and maintain as it is extending the project to interoperate with others. And that long term commitment to maintenance hasn't come out of the vibe coded ecosystem. Commitment is exactly what they don't want, rather they want the fast sugar high before they drop it and move on to the next thing. The biggest threat to open source is the strip mining of the entire ecosystem, destroying communities and practices that have made it thrive for decades. In the past, open source didn't win because it always had the best implementation, but because it was good enough to solve problems for enough people that it became self sustaining from the contribution of value. I feel that will continue, but it's also going to take a set back from those that aren't interested in contributing value back into the ecosystem from which they have extracted so much.
- hojeongna 6mo agoi've learned a lot from open source, and i'm building open source myself. so individually? yeah this stings a bit. but zooming out to the ecosystem level — i think there's still something genuinely positive happening here. the knowledge compounds, even if the credit doesn't. (luckily my projects are unpopular enough that nobody bothered training on them lol)
- syntheticmind 6mo ago[flagged]
- aedeal 6mo agoGood piece, but two things work against the thesis: The Sunsama example actually argues the opposite direction. He spent an afternoon hacking around a closed system with an agent and it worked. If agents are good enough to reverse-engineer and workaround proprietary software today, the urgency to switch to open source decreases, not increases. "Good enough" workarounds are how SaaS stays sticky. And agents don't eliminate the trust problem, they move it. Today you trust Sunsama with your workflows. In this vision, you trust your agent to correctly interpret your intent, modify code safely, and not introduce security holes. Non-technical users can't audit agent-modified code any better than they could audit the original source. You've traded one black box for another.
- apgwoz 6mo agoThe point this article makes, that suddenly agents can do the work of customizing free software, completely makes sense. But, the reality is that the Free Software movement is opposed to the way Lemons are built today, and would not accept a world like this. (Rightfully!) My belief is that Lemons effectively kill open source in the long run, and generally speaking, people forget that Free Software is even a thing. The reasoning for that is simple: it’s too easy to produce a “clean” derivative with just the parts you need. Lemons do much better with a fully Lemoned codebase than they do with a hybrid. Incentives to “rewrite” also free people from “licensing burdens” while the law is fuzzy.
- qweqweqwe1 6mo agowtf is lemon? can't you just write normally
- throwaway27448 6mo agoLet's wait until there are high-quality free software agents before we leap to this conclusion. That may be many years.
- lancetheai 6mo ago[flagged]
- wazionapps 6mo ago[flagged]
- allssu 6mo agoOne thing I keep noticing is that agents are getting better at implementation faster than they’re getting better at judgment. They can often wire up a library or scaffold a migration, but they’re still pretty shaky at the “should we choose this at all?” layer — pricing cliffs, version floors, lock-in, EOLs, migration blockers, etc. If coding agents do end up making free software more useful again, I think part of that will come from making open docs / changelogs / migration guides more usable at decision time, not just at implementation time.
- mergeshield 6mo ago[flagged]
- yason 6mo agoCoding agents and LLMs basically tivoize open source. When AI will eventually become the primary means to write code (because hand-programming is going to be slow enough that no company can continue like before) then that means AI becomes your new compiler that comes with a price tag, a subscription. Programmers were held hostage to commercial compilers until free compilers reached sufficient level of quality, but now it doesn't matter if your disk is full of free/open toolchains if it's not you who is commanding them but commercial AI agents. Undoubtedly there will be open-source LLMs eventually, of various levels of quality. But to write a free compiler you need a laptop while to train a free programming LLM you need a lot of money. And you also need money to run it. Programming has been one of the rare arts that even a poor, lower class kid can learn on his own with an old, cheap computer salvaged from a scrap bin and he can raise himself enough intellectual capital to become a well-paid programmer later. I wonder what the equivalent path will be in the future.
- otabdeveloper4 6mo ago> because hand-programming is going to be slow enough that no company can continue like before LLMs don't make programming faster, they just accelerate the technical debt process. On agregate they slow everything down because you there's more technical debt at the end of the tunnel. (OpenClaw is already unmaintainable today - for example, nobody has any clue what configuration options it supports, not even LLMs. Game over.)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- wazionapps 6mo ago[flagged]