6 ms·

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

154 points by backlit4034 3mo ago

calvinmorrison 3mo ago
Shift from passive consumption to active ownership. Implement rigid supply chain auditing. Formalize an open source contribution and patronage budget. Well none of these help my bottom line directly so my boss will not approve.
antoineleclair 3mo ago
I stopped reading at "load-bearing" and em dash.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- deleted 3mo ago
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- unlogic 3mo ago
  85% AI according to Pangram.
- drusepth 3mo ago
  Ironically, the prevalence of AI "tells" like that (combined with the ubiquity of AI works passed off as human-written) will inevitably feed back into more use by non-AI writers who think they're normal. (Also, I'm never gonna give up my em dashes.)
  - asdff 3mo ago
    This assumes non ai writers are drinking from the well of slop. Not all of course. Some people still read old books.
    - pixl97 3mo ago
      Old books don't tell you much about now in a great number of topics. >Gell-Mann Amnesia effect We're very familiar with this effect when it comes to the news, but since a lot of people are now looking at older information as some kind of escape it seems prudent to point out that old books themselves are of varying quality. Moreso, how do you track said quality of old books in the modern age where their will be incentives to game the system (for example those that own publishing rights to said books). Some books will be high quality, but the information in them will be outdated due to changes in understanding. Other books might as well have been written by AI and transported to the past they hold so many bullshit claims. The pareto distribution will cover the most popular books, but once you step into the long tail of research you've hit another no mans land of is it true or not.
      - asdff 3mo ago
        Reference material is one thing. But literature is pretty timeless. And there are used bookstores and public libraries.
        pixl97 3mo ago
        You might underestimate the amount of pulp paperbacks that have been printed over the years. Quite often these are just a single step above AI slop.
        asdff 3mo ago
        Sure, and it infests the little free 'libraries' you see scattered around the neighborhood and often the shelves in the Goodwill, but a good used bookstore and a good public library system will do a bit of filtering on that. These places aren't firehoses.
- bigfishrunning 3mo ago
  3 load-bearings. incredible.
pryelluw 3mo ago
I’ve stopped all my open source contributions and projects. I’ve now moved my resources to organizing and supporting communities like python Atlanta. My commitment was always the community and not the code. I also want to see what will companies do once open source closes shop and fewer people know how to program. It’s why I’m making sure there is a local support network for those of us who still want to stay in software over the long term.
- sshine 3mo ago
  I recently set up a Forgejo instance for a personal infrastructure project, and because of security, it’s read-only. So I just disable all the “issues”, “pull requests”, “wiki”. It’s a little sad, but also gratifying to know that I’m making stuff available, but I am not looking for any and every chance to have a conversation about it.
- pixl97 3mo ago
  I don't think the battle will be in open source software... I think it will be in hardware at our current rate. There has been ever increasing consolidation in the hardware world along with an ever growing acceptance of restrictions by the public 'for our safety'.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    Yeah. Manufacturers are simultaneously pricing and locking us out of silicon. Computers are moving back to big iron tier mainframes, and it looks like remote attestation is the future so any non-corporate owned device will be essentially useless. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it, or if we're ostracized from digital society should we figure out how to run it. Everything that everyone who believed in free software worked towards is being destroyed. There is no way to fight back unless we figure out how to fab computers in garages. It was all for nothing. The future is bleak.
    - whstl 3mo ago
      This is doubly bad with, in some cases, governments, banks and other institutions pretty much forcing us to own those locked-in devices to run their apps.
calvinmorrison 3mo ago
The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era. Here's my thoughts on this. It's back to open source, not open maintainer or open usage. I am producing lots of new code, i am publishing it. I am NOT interested in starting a project or having other people contribute. It's a cambrian explosion, the cost of adding features is basically zero. I'm going with "patching software is more common and we need tools around patching" rather than using other peoples stuff, just take what you want and fix it. One stupid one is XRDP required some hack to go through VNC to connect to an existing session. I now have it built into xrdp and lets you pick the X11 session you on dial up and you're good to go. Why is this not a feature I dont know, but xrdp does it all now without vnc or anything. good stuff. i published it sure, i dont care if anyone uses it though.
- bhaak 3mo ago
  > the cost of adding features is basically zero Adding features was always the easy part. Maintaining the code OTOH is not going to be easier. I see this with an experimental project I’m consciously vibecoding. The code base tends towards a spaghetti coded mess. Of course you can put in some refactoring prompts and the AI will reorganize the code. But that makes it worse actually. You have no mental model of the code and after a large refactoring even less.
  - calvinmorrison 3mo ago
    adding features was not the easy part for me - in fact it was a barrier for expressing most ideas I had.
datakan 3mo ago
>"For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain." Since when? Open source projects have for decades offered paid support. Projects like Red Hat, Snort, Security Onion and others. I don't know anyone that has ever thought this. It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise.
- simoncion 3mo ago
  > I don't know anyone that has ever thought this. I've known many people who have thought that. None of them were programmers, and many of them were managers.
- magicalist 3mo ago
  > It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise. Yes, it's always been accepted that someone has to support it, but someone else, not me. But these are important dependencies so I'm sure someone will support them. It's such a common situation that there's a six year old xkcd about it that felt about ten years late at the time.
bitbasher 3mo ago
I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read. The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026.. incredibly sad. Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.
- conartist6 3mo ago
  Nothing that was possible then is less possible or less potent now. The narrative is not friendly to communities of people owning complex software by sharing work now, but neither was it then. If you believe it was all wrong, an incorrect formulation, then disregard it and do not despair to move on. If you think ESR got something right that nobody can see anymore, then your hope should be rooted in the knowledge of how much less than what's possible we are currently achieving
  - magicalist 3mo ago
    > If you think ESR got something right that nobody can see anymore, then your hope should be rooted in the knowledge of how much less than what's possible we are currently achieving So...the worse things are the better because we have more things to improve? Wouldn't it just be better if things weren't worse? Can't entirely tell if this is supposed to be inspirational or contrarian (I think maybe the first one?), but every bit of shit in a situation being something we can look forward to overcoming by crawling through it isn't the most heart stirring way to look at it and also seems a bit dismissive without engaging with the actual subject.
    - conartist6 3mo ago
      Well I'm hopeful because I'm not a passive observer here, but rather a bazaar builder. I could talk for hours. If you want to hear what I have to say at length, come to the place where I build: https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX
- inigyou 3mo ago
  The bazaar has been overrun by an army of Cave Johnson's mantis-men. The cathedral is keeping its doors shut, carving out a mantis-free space inside. Occasionally they do controlled experiments on caged mantises.
deleted 3mo ago
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theturtletalks 3mo ago
Open-source alternatives are being launched at an ungodly pace and they are really polished. All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast. If the builder actually uses the software he's building, the feedback loop is really efficient. I keep a directory of open-source alternatives and just in the past month, I've replaced applications I've used for years with open-source alternatives.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- cdrini 3mo ago
  What open source alternatives have you switched to recently? Always on the lookout for good OS tools!
  - theturtletalks 3mo ago
    I replaced Raycast recently with Sol[0], but SuperCmd[1] is also really good. And I’m testing Helium Browser[2]. It’s based on Chromium, but has changed a lot under the hood and I’ve been daily driving it. Also replacing CapCut with OpenCut[3]. I’ve also completely ditched Codex CLI with Pi[4] and now am trying OMP[5]. 0. https://github.com/ospfranco/sol https://github.com/ospfranco/sol 1. https://github.com/SuperCmdLabs/SuperCmd https://github.com/SuperCmdLabs/SuperCmd 2. https://github.com/imputnet/helium https://github.com/imputnet/helium 3. https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut 4. https://github.com/earendil-works/pi https://github.com/earendil-works/pi 5. https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi
  - Cider9986 3mo ago
    OpenCode SuperCMD Zed Typewhisper
    - SeoFood 3mo ago
      <3
zcw100 3mo ago
People need to stop yelling "Slop!" all the time and saying silly things like "every line of code was reviewed by a human". First, it's ridiculous. There is no possible way to verify that claim, determine what was or wasn't done after reviewing it, and there's no reason to review every single line. It's performative. I have a ton of stuff I haven't bothered contributing. Why? So I can deal with all the hate? When it was "many hands make light work" there was value in sharing the load. Now I've got a backhoe and it's not worth the hassle.
- overgard 3mo ago
  It's not performative though. Slop is a burden. I'm sorry you feel excluded by that, but an AI generated PR is not of much value. The maintainer could just as easily do that, if that's what they wanted. Plus lets be realistic about why people contribute slop PRs, it's not for the betterment of the project usually, it's because they either want credit for a "contribution" they didn't bother to make themselves (If you give credit for that, then being a "contributor" is a worthless badge), or they're spamming people for bug bounties.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    It's an underrated point that providing LLM output to someone else is worthless because if they wanted it, they could put in the same input.
    - quantummagic 3mo ago
      Forming the prompt is still a skill, tokens aren't free, and it all takes some time and attention, which also has a price. So someone else doing that for you isn't exactly worthless, if they do a good job of it.
      - inigyou 3mo ago
        If they do a good job of it it won't be identifiable as AI output.
      - 3mo ago
sschueller 3mo ago
I love maintaining open source in an agentic world. I can be a complete asshole about contribution rules and coding standard as long as I define the AGENTS.md. The more strict the better and I can get good clean pull request without an endless back and fourth. I can even require updating the documentation! An OCD dream but you need to embrace it and configure it or you would get "AI slop".
- jeremyjh 3mo ago
  Could you share a link to an example? I couldn’t find any PRs you merged this year.
zzzeek 3mo ago
the issue with articles that try to analyze the state of open source and its sustainability and all that is that nothing about open source makes any sense if you just talk about it. Imagine you're transported to 1977 and you work at IBM and you try to tell them, oh hey I have an idea, how about the OS everyone uses for literally all commerce, communication, military, etc., you name it, will be written by one guy in his spare time and later maintained by tens of thousands of mostly unpaid volunteers. "Don't other companies try to copy it and sell it as their own?" "Well sure, but mostly it's better to use the free one everyone knows". Try selling your manager at IBM in 1977 that idea for new software. It would be impossible. It would be impossible today. Trying to explain how the global economy and welfare of most of humanity is hugely dependent on free software production labor, without the advent of actually seeing a world where this actually happens, is just like when we try to explain something like consciousness. There is no explanation that makes sense. So predictions about new avenues of doom (like "MIT licensing was a huge mistake! we should have all been GPL!") similarly dont carry a lot of weight, because of course these predictions make perfect sense in the abstract, yet real world results don't line up at all. Basically open source software is an emergent phenomenon, like consciousness or evolution, or perhaps even how very large language models suddenly seemed like real people. It's something that would never be predictable in its own absence, which means it will remain largely unpredictable how it will respond to ongoing changes such as "the open source authors and contributors now use programs themselves to produce more code".
- rixed 3mo ago
  How do you prove a system is chaotic in sociology? Without such a proof, isn't it natural to try to explain in retrospect even the systems you failed to predict?
robotmaxtron 3mo ago
The agentic era definition of open source is garbage. Software that is not open source, is proprietary software. Open weight models, are not open source. Binary blobs in a repo with an Apache license, is not open source. Am I a retro-grouch? Probably. I guess it doesn't matter anymore what I think about it.
- mike_hock 3mo ago
  Also, slop code is not open source. It's not source, it's a build artifact. The prompt is the source. But we don't have a deterministic build system for it so publishing the prompt isn't even useful.
  - robotmaxtron 3mo ago
    imho the prompt is part of a "design", not a build artifact (unless your build system is weird). a deterministic build system for prompts is a called a compiler.
    - jaxn 3mo ago
      they are saying the prompt is the source, the code is the artifact. I think it is a valid comparison. when reviewing a PR, I do want to see the prompt(s) that generated the change.
      - folkrav 3mo ago
        My latest feature was an overarching change across 4 different stacks, about a full work day of going back and forth iterating on different designs, generating workarounds for stack/language specific quirks and the business' usage patterns. Multiple fresh agent sessions, review passes, exploratory work with subagents, etc. "The prompt(s) that generated the change" in that context is multiple hours of discussion, Q&A, refactoring and feedback. Is that really the value, pages and pages of reactive prompting?
        3mo ago
strawberrysoda 3mo ago
[flagged]
- p2edwards 3mo ago
  Don't do this here.
richardjennings 3mo ago
This goes one of two ways. Either the LLM public capability is not sufficient to positively contribute, or it is. If it is not sufficient to positively contribute, open source projects become drowned in low quality contributions. If it is sufficient to positively contribute, we end up with multiple implementations of open source projects. Actually maybe it only goes one way.
- jeremyjh 3mo ago
  Personally I’ve been forking a lot more OSS and modifying it for my own use with little regard to contributing back because I haven’t read any of it myself and am not going to make public claims about it. It used to be I’d spend hours or days fixing a bug or adding a feature and getting it merged upstream seemed to help validate that effort. Now there is no effort so no need for validation and I continue on my way. The commits are in my fork if anyone wants them but I can’t imagine why anyone would. On the other hand a couple weeks ago I found an annoying bug in a coding agent project and had my agent fix it. It was a very small fix so I could tell it was correct with very little effort. I didn’t open a PR because that required a vouch, but I documented an issue (mostly on my own) and included the patch. I also referenced it in a downstream issue. Then I went to bed. The next morning, I saw a note from downstream thanking me - they’d updated to latest version and the issue was fixed. The projects bot had reproduced the issue based on my description, tested the fix, validated it, and opened a PR. The maintainer merged it an hour later (it was two lines and obviously correct - easy call with the bots validation) and released it. It felt like progress.
  - phkahler 3mo ago
    >> The commits are in my fork if anyone wants them but I can’t imagine why anyone would. This recently happened with solvespace (I am a maintainer). Someone posted a link to a fork with a bunch of goodies added. I think they just had AI implement some big features that had already been discussed and were either rejected or far future/maybe. That fork still exists but looks to be dead, as there hasn't been any new development since it first appeared. I had a good look at all the commits but I don't see any that I really want to grab as-is. Some of it looked a bit promising though. I recommend you at least make upstream aware of your fork if there is anything in it that they might want.
overgard 3mo ago
I feel like the AI labs have an embrace-extend-extinguish model here like Microsoft of the 90s. Train your models on all the open source code, then extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) Like, personally I think the reason why AI works as well as it does for typescript is because it's essentially gluing together a lot of open source code written by humans. The interesting functionality is mostly in those libraries. A developer that doesn't want to use AI can still be pretty productive within that context, but if the ecosystem is absolutely decimated..
- sshine 3mo ago
  > extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) That is neither the incentive of AI companies nor the truth. Availability of Open Source where stealing and illegal relicensing is not being litigated, is a perfect ecosystem for AI to work in. Maintainer exhaustion is totally a secondary effect, not intended. The maintainer economy was already not working out, AI amplified the asymmetry at play.
  - krupan 3mo ago
    I think you are correct on how it's playing out because AI cannot write software very well all on its own. The dream is that AI is so good that it can write all the code you need from scratch, replacing all and any code written by anyone else, but that's not happening
    - sshine 3mo ago
      With guidance, it kind of is happening. While, simultaneously, an abundance of slop is being made.
    - selectodude 3mo ago
      GPT-5.6 just finished writing a shim for me in rust that sits between Broadcom’s bullshit kernel and a standard Linux user space to turn my mesh routers into standard computers. At some point I’m not sure what the difference is in practice. Note: I can’t code. Not a line.
arjie 3mo ago
The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit. Today, I can replicate most software that way. So the promise is more realized than before. The actual code is useful, yes, because it means I don't have to have it written but if it didn't exist I'd still get there. The copyright and IP maximalism approaches aren't important to me. The world where everyone can have software written easily is much more appealing. The user freedom is better met.
- Forgeties79 3mo ago
  > The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit. Eh yes and no. The problem is I am not somebody who is comfortable building their own software, so I depend on the generous communities that create free, open source software I can reliably run on my computer. There are lots of people like me! So the benefit isn’t being able to adjust the software to my liking, it’s the knowledge that I can’t have the rug pulled out from under me as easily since I know in theory I can run the software locally, but realistically (hopefully!) somebody else is going to fork and maintain it.
- jeremyjh 3mo ago
  The software you have generated for your personal use is a micro fraction of all the software that it uses directly and indirectly to fulfill your needs. The rest is OSS maintained by someone at no cost to you.
  - arjie 3mo ago
    The rest is not OSS. Some of it is. Lots of it is proprietary software too and maintained at no cost to me. I can't imagine how much network switching software my stuff goes through. Didn't pay anything for that.
    - jeremyjh 3mo ago
      If you pay someone for internet access you are paying for most of that, and I’m guessing you paid for the switch and router in your own house. But I was talking about the software running on your computer that your code invokes.
krupan 3mo ago
"One participant at the retreat noted that permissive licensing was a profound collective mistake, serving as a legal mechanism that enabled the world’s largest corporations to cannibalize volunteer labor..." Agreed. Linux and GNU did and still do so well because of the GPL. Red Hat built a billion dollar business on GPL software. Tons of Linux developers are payed great salaries by competing corporations that otherwise collaborate on Linux, because none of them are allowed by the GPL to make proprietary changes to the code
- ColdStream 3mo ago
  It is amazing how the GPL has inadvertently held up against newer technologies that they couldn't conceive of or just didn't think were a big issue at the time. Also, you can make propitiatory changes if it is contained within the business. Once you make them public is when there is an issue. But I doubt folks would be wanting to keep patching in their proprietary stuff with every new Linux kernel for instance.
phkahler 3mo ago
Permissive licensing is a large part of the issue TFA is talking about. GPL does not have those issues. All FLOSS suffers from AI ingesting the code and being able to output work-alike programs to some extent, but for now large GPL programs - Inkscape, Firefox, VLC, Blender, FreeCAD, KiCAD, the Linux kernel, etc are all safe - none of them are permissively licensed so nobody can proprietize them (is that a word?) Unfortunately (in my opinion) the rewrite it in Rust movement also abandoned non-permissive licensing, so over time a progressively larger body of work will fall to this.
- Chu4eeno 3mo ago
  > All FLOSS suffers from AI ingesting the code and being able to output work-alike programs to some extent You can also just set some LLM in a loop up with objdump and a C compiler and "copyright-wash" work-alikes of any proprietary software out there. Can't wait for someone to start burning tokens on doing it to baseband firmware and watch everyone who cheered on the non-GPL chardet (plus regulators) squirm.
0xferruccio 3mo ago
The irony of this article is that it reads with the annoying robotic cadence that makes me not want to read slop blogs Sentences like "The licensing paradox: From freedom to exploitation" are starting to burn my eyes
erelong 3mo ago
I think one of the other comments gets in to it, but it's really either AI gets good enough so we can accelerate OSS development with agents, or it's not good enough and that will probably force a pull-back towards more manually created code (and so no need to worry too much either way as the issue will sort itself out?)
nullorempty 3mo ago
My reaction is to the discussion more than the the article. Many have noted that LLMs are relatively good at writing code because they learned from all the code and other material, such as books, written before. But let's say that we no longer produce the learning material, will LLMs be able to progress on their own or the slop they make (and read) will eventually lead to the decay of the models? Will the models decay if left to their own devices?
bigwhite 3mo ago
With the lowering of implementation barriers—approaching a near-zero entry threshold—more open-source software will emerge. But at the same time, more “one-off open-source” projects will also appear. Their characteristics are: - They meet the localized needs of the original author or a certain subset of people. - They very likely will not be continuously maintained.
physix 3mo ago
I think the article is really good, until it starts to offer guidance and making suggestions for the future. I can't pin it down precisely, but my feeling is that it doesn't fully recognize the fundamental shift taking place. In a sense it's not radical enough, trying more to keep a system afloat whose foundation is being dismantled. The forces that gave rise to open source will find a new way, because they are based on the nature of the human spirit. We just don't know what it will look like yet.
mahirsaid 3mo ago
Just to mention the hosting of open-source software that isn't reliable. This not only creates a level of uncertainty, but causes lack of trust. The systems a whole is becoming neglected. Microsoft v=benefited from numerous open-source software, yet all there worried about is their subscriptions.
socalgal2 3mo ago
> For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain. This is provably false and wish that sentiment would die Microsoft spends at least $600-$800 million on open source The make VS Code, .NET/C#, Edge, TypeScript. They provide free hosting, free CIs, free issues, discussions, free webpages (github). Google spends similar amounts on Chromium, Angular, Go, Flutter, Gemma, etc... Meta spends similar amounts on React, PyTorch, Presto, Llama Amazon sends 200-300 million on valkey, OpenSearch, FireCracker, and has dedicated engineers for Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Rust Apple provide swift, WebKit, Clang/LLVM - there spending is also in the 100-200 million range. That's on top of employees at almost all of those companies fixing bugs and providing patches for everything they use. People make up the claims like the OP with zero actual evidence.
- pmontra 3mo ago
  All of those companies have very compelling reasons to provide those tools for free, as in (most importantly dor adoption) no money asked and (less importantly) open source. They make money because of the number of people using those tools. They are a bridge head into controlling their own share of the market. So: investment, not good will.
  - socalgal2 3mo ago
    irrelevant
- Bruises 3mo ago
  I'm not sure if you just missed that the OP said "myth" because you seem to be in complete agreement with them.
  - socalgal2 3mo ago
    The OP is saying companies are operating on the myth that open source is free. No, they are not operating in my myth its free. Spending hundreds of millions a year is not "operating on the myth that open source is free". Spending 0 would be
markhahn 3mo ago
smells of AI-pilled management viewpoint. the kind who think that AI has already changed the whole software landscape.
jasonkester 3mo ago
I had to flag this article for violating HN's policy against submitting things written by AI. Which is a shame, because the premise is intriguing. But it's pretty rude to expect every one of us to sift through ten pages of AI tells to reverse engineer the prompts that hold the information the author wanted to convey. As the saying goes, "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?" So I ask the Author: Please write this article for us using your own words, taking your own time to convey your thoughts. Submit it and let us read it. I bet it will be better than this.
- tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
  I’m not sure which is worse, content written by AI or people complaining about content being written by AI.
  - yummybrainz 3mo ago
    Pretty sure it's the former!
    - willismichael 3mo ago
      No way, it's AI generated content complaining about AI generated content.
  - scratcheee 3mo ago
    When it comes to fluff/slop/etc, worse can be measured by word count, so there’s your answer.
  - miniBill 3mo ago
    The former
- mikkolaakkonen 3mo ago
  I totally agree, would love to read this "properly" !
- a-french-anon 3mo ago
jdthedisciple 3mo ago
> load-bearing Claude! [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905248
aniceperson 3mo ago
> Maintainers of load-bearing open-source packages — the invisible pillars holding up modern digital banking Hi claude
osk9934 3mo ago
an article written by AI to complain about AI full of tells like overuse of "load-bearing"

154 points by backlit4034 3mo ago

Shift from passive consumption to active ownership. Implement rigid supply chain auditing. Formalize an open source contribution and patronage budget. Well none of these help my bottom line directly so my boss will not approve.

antoineleclair 3mo ago

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

deleted 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago
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unlogic 3mo ago
85% AI according to Pangram.
drusepth 3mo ago
Ironically, the prevalence of AI "tells" like that (combined with the ubiquity of AI works passed off as human-written) will inevitably feed back into more use by non-AI writers who think they're normal. (Also, I'm never gonna give up my em dashes.)
- asdff 3mo ago
  This assumes non ai writers are drinking from the well of slop. Not all of course. Some people still read old books.
  - pixl97 3mo ago
    Old books don't tell you much about now in a great number of topics. >Gell-Mann Amnesia effect We're very familiar with this effect when it comes to the news, but since a lot of people are now looking at older information as some kind of escape it seems prudent to point out that old books themselves are of varying quality. Moreso, how do you track said quality of old books in the modern age where their will be incentives to game the system (for example those that own publishing rights to said books). Some books will be high quality, but the information in them will be outdated due to changes in understanding. Other books might as well have been written by AI and transported to the past they hold so many bullshit claims. The pareto distribution will cover the most popular books, but once you step into the long tail of research you've hit another no mans land of is it true or not.
    - asdff 3mo ago
      Reference material is one thing. But literature is pretty timeless. And there are used bookstores and public libraries.
      - pixl97 3mo ago
        You might underestimate the amount of pulp paperbacks that have been printed over the years. Quite often these are just a single step above AI slop.
        asdff 3mo ago
        Sure, and it infests the little free 'libraries' you see scattered around the neighborhood and often the shelves in the Goodwill, but a good used bookstore and a good public library system will do a bit of filtering on that. These places aren't firehoses.
bigfishrunning 3mo ago
3 load-bearings. incredible.

pryelluw 3mo ago

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

sshine 3mo ago
I recently set up a Forgejo instance for a personal infrastructure project, and because of security, it’s read-only. So I just disable all the “issues”, “pull requests”, “wiki”. It’s a little sad, but also gratifying to know that I’m making stuff available, but I am not looking for any and every chance to have a conversation about it.
pixl97 3mo ago
I don't think the battle will be in open source software... I think it will be in hardware at our current rate. There has been ever increasing consolidation in the hardware world along with an ever growing acceptance of restrictions by the public 'for our safety'.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  Yeah. Manufacturers are simultaneously pricing and locking us out of silicon. Computers are moving back to big iron tier mainframes, and it looks like remote attestation is the future so any non-corporate owned device will be essentially useless. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it, or if we're ostracized from digital society should we figure out how to run it. Everything that everyone who believed in free software worked towards is being destroyed. There is no way to fight back unless we figure out how to fab computers in garages. It was all for nothing. The future is bleak.
  - whstl 3mo ago
    This is doubly bad with, in some cases, governments, banks and other institutions pretty much forcing us to own those locked-in devices to run their apps.

calvinmorrison 3mo ago

The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era. Here's my thoughts on this. It's back to open source, not open maintainer or open usage. I am producing lots of new code, i am publishing it. I am NOT interested in starting a project or having other people contribute. It's a cambrian explosion, the cost of adding features is basically zero. I'm going with "patching software is more common and we need tools around patching" rather than using other peoples stuff, just take what you want and fix it. One stupid one is XRDP required some hack to go through VNC to connect to an existing session. I now have it built into xrdp and lets you pick the X11 session you on dial up and you're good to go. Why is this not a feature I dont know, but xrdp does it all now without vnc or anything. good stuff. i published it sure, i dont care if anyone uses it though.

bhaak 3mo ago
> the cost of adding features is basically zero Adding features was always the easy part. Maintaining the code OTOH is not going to be easier. I see this with an experimental project I’m consciously vibecoding. The code base tends towards a spaghetti coded mess. Of course you can put in some refactoring prompts and the AI will reorganize the code. But that makes it worse actually. You have no mental model of the code and after a large refactoring even less.
- calvinmorrison 3mo ago
  adding features was not the easy part for me - in fact it was a barrier for expressing most ideas I had.

datakan 3mo ago

>"For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain." Since when? Open source projects have for decades offered paid support. Projects like Red Hat, Snort, Security Onion and others. I don't know anyone that has ever thought this. It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise.

simoncion 3mo ago
> I don't know anyone that has ever thought this. I've known many people who have thought that. None of them were programmers, and many of them were managers.
magicalist 3mo ago
> It's always been generally accepted that someone has to support it, either paid professional services or a full time employee with expertise. Yes, it's always been accepted that someone has to support it, but someone else, not me. But these are important dependencies so I'm sure someone will support them. It's such a common situation that there's a six year old xkcd about it that felt about ten years late at the time.

bitbasher 3mo ago

I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read. The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026.. incredibly sad. Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.

conartist6 3mo ago
Nothing that was possible then is less possible or less potent now. The narrative is not friendly to communities of people owning complex software by sharing work now, but neither was it then. If you believe it was all wrong, an incorrect formulation, then disregard it and do not despair to move on. If you think ESR got something right that nobody can see anymore, then your hope should be rooted in the knowledge of how much less than what's possible we are currently achieving
- magicalist 3mo ago
  > If you think ESR got something right that nobody can see anymore, then your hope should be rooted in the knowledge of how much less than what's possible we are currently achieving So...the worse things are the better because we have more things to improve? Wouldn't it just be better if things weren't worse? Can't entirely tell if this is supposed to be inspirational or contrarian (I think maybe the first one?), but every bit of shit in a situation being something we can look forward to overcoming by crawling through it isn't the most heart stirring way to look at it and also seems a bit dismissive without engaging with the actual subject.
  - conartist6 3mo ago
    Well I'm hopeful because I'm not a passive observer here, but rather a bazaar builder. I could talk for hours. If you want to hear what I have to say at length, come to the place where I build: https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX
inigyou 3mo ago
The bazaar has been overrun by an army of Cave Johnson's mantis-men. The cathedral is keeping its doors shut, carving out a mantis-free space inside. Occasionally they do controlled experiments on caged mantises.

deleted 3mo ago

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theturtletalks 3mo ago

Open-source alternatives are being launched at an ungodly pace and they are really polished. All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast. If the builder actually uses the software he's building, the feedback loop is really efficient. I keep a directory of open-source alternatives and just in the past month, I've replaced applications I've used for years with open-source alternatives.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
cdrini 3mo ago
What open source alternatives have you switched to recently? Always on the lookout for good OS tools!
- theturtletalks 3mo ago
  I replaced Raycast recently with Sol[0], but SuperCmd[1] is also really good. And I’m testing Helium Browser[2]. It’s based on Chromium, but has changed a lot under the hood and I’ve been daily driving it. Also replacing CapCut with OpenCut[3]. I’ve also completely ditched Codex CLI with Pi[4] and now am trying OMP[5]. 0. https://github.com/ospfranco/sol https://github.com/ospfranco/sol 1. https://github.com/SuperCmdLabs/SuperCmd https://github.com/SuperCmdLabs/SuperCmd 2. https://github.com/imputnet/helium https://github.com/imputnet/helium 3. https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut 4. https://github.com/earendil-works/pi https://github.com/earendil-works/pi 5. https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi
- Cider9986 3mo ago
  OpenCode SuperCMD Zed Typewhisper
  - SeoFood 3mo ago
    <3

zcw100 3mo ago

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

overgard 3mo ago
It's not performative though. Slop is a burden. I'm sorry you feel excluded by that, but an AI generated PR is not of much value. The maintainer could just as easily do that, if that's what they wanted. Plus lets be realistic about why people contribute slop PRs, it's not for the betterment of the project usually, it's because they either want credit for a "contribution" they didn't bother to make themselves (If you give credit for that, then being a "contributor" is a worthless badge), or they're spamming people for bug bounties.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  It's an underrated point that providing LLM output to someone else is worthless because if they wanted it, they could put in the same input.
  - quantummagic 3mo ago
    Forming the prompt is still a skill, tokens aren't free, and it all takes some time and attention, which also has a price. So someone else doing that for you isn't exactly worthless, if they do a good job of it.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      If they do a good job of it it won't be identifiable as AI output.
    - 3mo ago

sschueller 3mo ago

I love maintaining open source in an agentic world. I can be a complete asshole about contribution rules and coding standard as long as I define the AGENTS.md. The more strict the better and I can get good clean pull request without an endless back and fourth. I can even require updating the documentation! An OCD dream but you need to embrace it and configure it or you would get "AI slop".

jeremyjh 3mo ago
Could you share a link to an example? I couldn’t find any PRs you merged this year.

zzzeek 3mo ago

the issue with articles that try to analyze the state of open source and its sustainability and all that is that nothing about open source makes any sense if you just talk about it. Imagine you're transported to 1977 and you work at IBM and you try to tell them, oh hey I have an idea, how about the OS everyone uses for literally all commerce, communication, military, etc., you name it, will be written by one guy in his spare time and later maintained by tens of thousands of mostly unpaid volunteers. "Don't other companies try to copy it and sell it as their own?" "Well sure, but mostly it's better to use the free one everyone knows". Try selling your manager at IBM in 1977 that idea for new software. It would be impossible. It would be impossible today. Trying to explain how the global economy and welfare of most of humanity is hugely dependent on free software production labor, without the advent of actually seeing a world where this actually happens, is just like when we try to explain something like consciousness. There is no explanation that makes sense. So predictions about new avenues of doom (like "MIT licensing was a huge mistake! we should have all been GPL!") similarly dont carry a lot of weight, because of course these predictions make perfect sense in the abstract, yet real world results don't line up at all. Basically open source software is an emergent phenomenon, like consciousness or evolution, or perhaps even how very large language models suddenly seemed like real people. It's something that would never be predictable in its own absence, which means it will remain largely unpredictable how it will respond to ongoing changes such as "the open source authors and contributors now use programs themselves to produce more code".

rixed 3mo ago
How do you prove a system is chaotic in sociology? Without such a proof, isn't it natural to try to explain in retrospect even the systems you failed to predict?

robotmaxtron 3mo ago

The agentic era definition of open source is garbage. Software that is not open source, is proprietary software. Open weight models, are not open source. Binary blobs in a repo with an Apache license, is not open source. Am I a retro-grouch? Probably. I guess it doesn't matter anymore what I think about it.

mike_hock 3mo ago
Also, slop code is not open source. It's not source, it's a build artifact. The prompt is the source. But we don't have a deterministic build system for it so publishing the prompt isn't even useful.
- robotmaxtron 3mo ago
  imho the prompt is part of a "design", not a build artifact (unless your build system is weird). a deterministic build system for prompts is a called a compiler.
  - jaxn 3mo ago
    they are saying the prompt is the source, the code is the artifact. I think it is a valid comparison. when reviewing a PR, I do want to see the prompt(s) that generated the change.
    - folkrav 3mo ago
      My latest feature was an overarching change across 4 different stacks, about a full work day of going back and forth iterating on different designs, generating workarounds for stack/language specific quirks and the business' usage patterns. Multiple fresh agent sessions, review passes, exploratory work with subagents, etc. "The prompt(s) that generated the change" in that context is multiple hours of discussion, Q&A, refactoring and feedback. Is that really the value, pages and pages of reactive prompting?
      - 3mo ago

strawberrysoda 3mo ago

[flagged]

p2edwards 3mo ago
Don't do this here.

richardjennings 3mo ago

This goes one of two ways. Either the LLM public capability is not sufficient to positively contribute, or it is. If it is not sufficient to positively contribute, open source projects become drowned in low quality contributions. If it is sufficient to positively contribute, we end up with multiple implementations of open source projects. Actually maybe it only goes one way.

jeremyjh 3mo ago
Personally I’ve been forking a lot more OSS and modifying it for my own use with little regard to contributing back because I haven’t read any of it myself and am not going to make public claims about it. It used to be I’d spend hours or days fixing a bug or adding a feature and getting it merged upstream seemed to help validate that effort. Now there is no effort so no need for validation and I continue on my way. The commits are in my fork if anyone wants them but I can’t imagine why anyone would. On the other hand a couple weeks ago I found an annoying bug in a coding agent project and had my agent fix it. It was a very small fix so I could tell it was correct with very little effort. I didn’t open a PR because that required a vouch, but I documented an issue (mostly on my own) and included the patch. I also referenced it in a downstream issue. Then I went to bed. The next morning, I saw a note from downstream thanking me - they’d updated to latest version and the issue was fixed. The projects bot had reproduced the issue based on my description, tested the fix, validated it, and opened a PR. The maintainer merged it an hour later (it was two lines and obviously correct - easy call with the bots validation) and released it. It felt like progress.
- phkahler 3mo ago
  >> The commits are in my fork if anyone wants them but I can’t imagine why anyone would. This recently happened with solvespace (I am a maintainer). Someone posted a link to a fork with a bunch of goodies added. I think they just had AI implement some big features that had already been discussed and were either rejected or far future/maybe. That fork still exists but looks to be dead, as there hasn't been any new development since it first appeared. I had a good look at all the commits but I don't see any that I really want to grab as-is. Some of it looked a bit promising though. I recommend you at least make upstream aware of your fork if there is anything in it that they might want.

overgard 3mo ago

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

sshine 3mo ago
> extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) That is neither the incentive of AI companies nor the truth. Availability of Open Source where stealing and illegal relicensing is not being litigated, is a perfect ecosystem for AI to work in. Maintainer exhaustion is totally a secondary effect, not intended. The maintainer economy was already not working out, AI amplified the asymmetry at play.
- krupan 3mo ago
  I think you are correct on how it's playing out because AI cannot write software very well all on its own. The dream is that AI is so good that it can write all the code you need from scratch, replacing all and any code written by anyone else, but that's not happening
  - sshine 3mo ago
    With guidance, it kind of is happening. While, simultaneously, an abundance of slop is being made.
  - selectodude 3mo ago
    GPT-5.6 just finished writing a shim for me in rust that sits between Broadcom’s bullshit kernel and a standard Linux user space to turn my mesh routers into standard computers. At some point I’m not sure what the difference is in practice. Note: I can’t code. Not a line.

arjie 3mo ago

The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit. Today, I can replicate most software that way. So the promise is more realized than before. The actual code is useful, yes, because it means I don't have to have it written but if it didn't exist I'd still get there. The copyright and IP maximalism approaches aren't important to me. The world where everyone can have software written easily is much more appealing. The user freedom is better met.

Forgeties79 3mo ago
> The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit. Eh yes and no. The problem is I am not somebody who is comfortable building their own software, so I depend on the generous communities that create free, open source software I can reliably run on my computer. There are lots of people like me! So the benefit isn’t being able to adjust the software to my liking, it’s the knowledge that I can’t have the rug pulled out from under me as easily since I know in theory I can run the software locally, but realistically (hopefully!) somebody else is going to fork and maintain it.
jeremyjh 3mo ago
The software you have generated for your personal use is a micro fraction of all the software that it uses directly and indirectly to fulfill your needs. The rest is OSS maintained by someone at no cost to you.
- arjie 3mo ago
  The rest is not OSS. Some of it is. Lots of it is proprietary software too and maintained at no cost to me. I can't imagine how much network switching software my stuff goes through. Didn't pay anything for that.
  - jeremyjh 3mo ago
    If you pay someone for internet access you are paying for most of that, and I’m guessing you paid for the switch and router in your own house. But I was talking about the software running on your computer that your code invokes.

krupan 3mo ago

"One participant at the retreat noted that permissive licensing was a profound collective mistake, serving as a legal mechanism that enabled the world’s largest corporations to cannibalize volunteer labor..." Agreed. Linux and GNU did and still do so well because of the GPL. Red Hat built a billion dollar business on GPL software. Tons of Linux developers are payed great salaries by competing corporations that otherwise collaborate on Linux, because none of them are allowed by the GPL to make proprietary changes to the code

ColdStream 3mo ago
It is amazing how the GPL has inadvertently held up against newer technologies that they couldn't conceive of or just didn't think were a big issue at the time. Also, you can make propitiatory changes if it is contained within the business. Once you make them public is when there is an issue. But I doubt folks would be wanting to keep patching in their proprietary stuff with every new Linux kernel for instance.

phkahler 3mo ago

Permissive licensing is a large part of the issue TFA is talking about. GPL does not have those issues. All FLOSS suffers from AI ingesting the code and being able to output work-alike programs to some extent, but for now large GPL programs - Inkscape, Firefox, VLC, Blender, FreeCAD, KiCAD, the Linux kernel, etc are all safe - none of them are permissively licensed so nobody can proprietize them (is that a word?) Unfortunately (in my opinion) the rewrite it in Rust movement also abandoned non-permissive licensing, so over time a progressively larger body of work will fall to this.

Chu4eeno 3mo ago
> All FLOSS suffers from AI ingesting the code and being able to output work-alike programs to some extent You can also just set some LLM in a loop up with objdump and a C compiler and "copyright-wash" work-alikes of any proprietary software out there. Can't wait for someone to start burning tokens on doing it to baseband firmware and watch everyone who cheered on the non-GPL chardet (plus regulators) squirm.

0xferruccio 3mo ago

The irony of this article is that it reads with the annoying robotic cadence that makes me not want to read slop blogs Sentences like "The licensing paradox: From freedom to exploitation" are starting to burn my eyes

erelong 3mo ago

I think one of the other comments gets in to it, but it's really either AI gets good enough so we can accelerate OSS development with agents, or it's not good enough and that will probably force a pull-back towards more manually created code (and so no need to worry too much either way as the issue will sort itself out?)

nullorempty 3mo ago

My reaction is to the discussion more than the the article. Many have noted that LLMs are relatively good at writing code because they learned from all the code and other material, such as books, written before. But let's say that we no longer produce the learning material, will LLMs be able to progress on their own or the slop they make (and read) will eventually lead to the decay of the models? Will the models decay if left to their own devices?

bigwhite 3mo ago

With the lowering of implementation barriers—approaching a near-zero entry threshold—more open-source software will emerge. But at the same time, more “one-off open-source” projects will also appear. Their characteristics are: - They meet the localized needs of the original author or a certain subset of people. - They very likely will not be continuously maintained.

physix 3mo ago

I think the article is really good, until it starts to offer guidance and making suggestions for the future. I can't pin it down precisely, but my feeling is that it doesn't fully recognize the fundamental shift taking place. In a sense it's not radical enough, trying more to keep a system afloat whose foundation is being dismantled. The forces that gave rise to open source will find a new way, because they are based on the nature of the human spirit. We just don't know what it will look like yet.

mahirsaid 3mo ago

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

socalgal2 3mo ago

> For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain. This is provably false and wish that sentiment would die Microsoft spends at least $600-$800 million on open source The make VS Code, .NET/C#, Edge, TypeScript. They provide free hosting, free CIs, free issues, discussions, free webpages (github). Google spends similar amounts on Chromium, Angular, Go, Flutter, Gemma, etc... Meta spends similar amounts on React, PyTorch, Presto, Llama Amazon sends 200-300 million on valkey, OpenSearch, FireCracker, and has dedicated engineers for Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Rust Apple provide swift, WebKit, Clang/LLVM - there spending is also in the 100-200 million range. That's on top of employees at almost all of those companies fixing bugs and providing patches for everything they use. People make up the claims like the OP with zero actual evidence.

pmontra 3mo ago
All of those companies have very compelling reasons to provide those tools for free, as in (most importantly dor adoption) no money asked and (less importantly) open source. They make money because of the number of people using those tools. They are a bridge head into controlling their own share of the market. So: investment, not good will.
- socalgal2 3mo ago
  irrelevant
Bruises 3mo ago
I'm not sure if you just missed that the OP said "myth" because you seem to be in complete agreement with them.
- socalgal2 3mo ago
  The OP is saying companies are operating on the myth that open source is free. No, they are not operating in my myth its free. Spending hundreds of millions a year is not "operating on the myth that open source is free". Spending 0 would be

markhahn 3mo ago

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

jasonkester 3mo ago

I had to flag this article for violating HN's policy against submitting things written by AI. Which is a shame, because the premise is intriguing. But it's pretty rude to expect every one of us to sift through ten pages of AI tells to reverse engineer the prompts that hold the information the author wanted to convey. As the saying goes, "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?" So I ask the Author: Please write this article for us using your own words, taking your own time to convey your thoughts. Submit it and let us read it. I bet it will be better than this.

tonyedgecombe 3mo ago
I’m not sure which is worse, content written by AI or people complaining about content being written by AI.
- yummybrainz 3mo ago
  Pretty sure it's the former!
  - willismichael 3mo ago
    No way, it's AI generated content complaining about AI generated content.
- scratcheee 3mo ago
  When it comes to fluff/slop/etc, worse can be measured by word count, so there’s your answer.
- miniBill 3mo ago
  The former
mikkolaakkonen 3mo ago
I totally agree, would love to read this "properly" !
a-french-anon 3mo ago

jdthedisciple 3mo ago

> load-bearing Claude! [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48905248

aniceperson 3mo ago

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

osk9934 3mo ago

an article written by AI to complain about AI full of tells like overuse of "load-bearing"