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..
> 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.
As far as I can tell, Anthropic's entire goal is to extinguish software development as a profession. If they do that, I don't see how they wouldn't take out open source with it as a consequence. If nobody even looks at code why would anyone bother to publish a library, much less care about it?
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
Iāve stopped all my open source contributions and projects. Iāve 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. Itās why Iām making sure there is a local support network for those of us who still want to stay in software over the long term.
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'.
I recently set up a Forgejo instance for a personal infrastructure project, and because of security, itās read-only. So I just disable all the āissuesā, āpull requestsā, āwikiā. Itās a little sad, but also gratifying to know that Iām making stuff available, but I am not looking for any and every chance to have a conversation about it.
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.
>"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.
"One participant at the retreat noted that permissive licensing was a profound collective mistake, serving as a legal mechanism that enabled the worldās 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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 isnāt being able to adjust the software to my liking, itās the knowledge that I canāt 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.
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 than 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
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.
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.
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".
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.
Kind of like going to the app store and picking the app with the most downloads because the other option is looking at 400 different apps that may or may not do the same thing.
The problem is as usual, users. AI for maintenance (updating & testing deps, re-writing parts to run with next major version of lib) is pretty low error % and just need some supervision and can make it more effective, in hands of people already familiar with project
But the flipside is of course users that are clueless won't now be stopped by "can't make a PR", they will throw prompt at AI and send it when the AI decides it's good enough
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
> 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.
As far as I can tell, Anthropic's entire goal is to extinguish software development as a profession. If they do that, I don't see how they wouldn't take out open source with it as a consequence. If nobody even looks at code why would anyone bother to publish a library, much less care about it?
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
Iāve stopped all my open source contributions and projects. Iāve 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. Itās why Iām making sure there is a local support network for those of us who still want to stay in software over the long term.
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'.
I recently set up a Forgejo instance for a personal infrastructure project, and because of security, itās read-only. So I just disable all the āissuesā, āpull requestsā, āwikiā. Itās a little sad, but also gratifying to know that Iām making stuff available, but I am not looking for any and every chance to have a conversation about it.
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.
>"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.
"One participant at the retreat noted that permissive licensing was a profound collective mistake, serving as a legal mechanism that enabled the worldās 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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 isnāt being able to adjust the software to my liking, itās the knowledge that I canāt 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.
I recently read Eric Raymondās 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.
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 than 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
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.
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.
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.
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".
Could you share a link to an example? I couldnāt find any PRs you merged this year.
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.
What open source alternatives have you switched to recently? Always on the lookout for good OS tools!
I replaced Raycast recently with Sol[0], but SuperCmd[1] is also really good.
And Iām testing Helium Browser[2]. Itās based on Chromium, but has changed a lot under the hood and Iāve been daily driving it.
Also replacing CapCut with OpenCut[3].
Iāve also completely ditched Codex CLI with Pi[4] and now am trying OMP[5].
0. https://github.com/ospfranco/sol
1. https://github.com/SuperCmdLabs/SuperCmd
2. https://github.com/imputnet/helium
3. https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut
4. https://github.com/earendil-works/pi
5. https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi
OpenCode
SuperCMD
Zed
Typewhisper
> All these comments about AI Slop are underestimating how good these builders have gotten and AI lets you iterate really fast.
Both of these are true: weāre witnessing an unprecedented amount of slop, while also the tools get better and better.
So when talking about Open Source maintainer exhaustion, itās because of the slop, not because of the great tooling.
AI is an amplifier, and in this case it amplifies the great asymmetry between contributor and maintainer.
The 80/20 rule and bullshit asymmetry apply here.
Kind of like going to the app store and picking the app with the most downloads because the other option is looking at 400 different apps that may or may not do the same thing.
The problem is as usual, users. AI for maintenance (updating & testing deps, re-writing parts to run with next major version of lib) is pretty low error % and just need some supervision and can make it more effective, in hands of people already familiar with project
But the flipside is of course users that are clueless won't now be stopped by "can't make a PR", they will throw prompt at AI and send it when the AI decides it's good enough
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".
You deserve a triple-bitch BJ for this comment, well said sir
Don't do this here.
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.
> 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 Iām 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.
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.
I stopped reading at "load-bearing" and em dash.
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.)
This assumes non ai writers are drinking from the well of slop. Not all of course. Some people still read old books.
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.
Reference material is one thing. But literature is pretty timeless. And there are used bookstores and public libraries.
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.
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.
3 load-bearings. incredible.
85% AI according to Pangram.