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Maybe I've got rose-colored glasses but I love open source too much to believe it will not survive this AI wave. There's just something too profound about putting an idea out there and having people instantly build on top of it. I refuse to believe that will lose value or go away.

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I'm seeing way more open source projects pop up because of AI - whether they'll stay maintained or are actually good is another question, but how much of existing open source is actually good and stays maintained? In a way AI derisks the abandoned projects a bit if you can maintain it yourself now

I've seen two arguments: (1) With code being so cheap to produce, people will recreate things instead of building on top of community infrastructure. (2) High volume of slop AI PRs cause OSS to be more locked down as far as who can contribute and cause ecosystem breakdown that way.

1. bespoke bad copies of good software predate slop. the bar is lower, but the pain will be the same. it didn't stop oss then, i don't see it doing so now 2. oss was already underwater in bugs and feature asks. at least these come with maybe fixes, & ai triage might help separate wheat from chaff.

i'm not worried that open source goes away because of this, but i do anticipate several more years of heated reactions before good social mores settle out of the mix (so hitch up your "no thanks" belt-waders now)

I’m not worried about (1) for projects with ecosystems. Small libraries and apps may be affected. (2) does worry me. We’ll likely go through the same cycle schools face with LLM cheating. There’ll be a way to measure where a PR sits on the human–vibe-coded scale, and maintainers will set their bar.

WRT to (1) do you think we might end up in a place where only the current big whales survive and there's no way for new communities to emerge and grow?