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. They're not exactly subtle. 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 making it maintainable? Shit, if everybody is vibe coding how long before your "average" dev has no idea what a library even is or why you'd want one?
> Anthropic's entire goal is to extinguish software development as a profession
They’re killing “programmer”, not “code”.
> I don't see how they wouldn't take out open source with it as a consequence
An analogy: the automobile industry sought to make working horses redundant, not to go door-to-door and kill horses. Horses getting chopped was an indirect economic consequence.
> If nobody even looks at code why would anyone bother to publish a library, much less care about making it maintainable?
For the exact same reasons as before. Agentic programming still integrates well with the existing ecosystem; I’ll tell agents which libraries to use, so I know what to expect.
While I don’t read the implementation of anything any more unless there’s a hard algorithmic problem, I do make an effort to read and document APIs thoroughly.
Interfacing is exactly the same, it’s just agents doing it.
> if everybody is vibe coding how long before your "average" dev has no idea what a library even is or why you'd want one?
That is a very good question.
Well it's not the dev who would want one, it's the agent, for the same reliability/security reasons that a dev historically would have.
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
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.
With guidance, it kind of is happening.
While, simultaneously, an abundance of slop is being made.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
> 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.
"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
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.
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
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.
Yeah Eric Raymond and open source were a bad move. Should have stuck to Free Software - as in GPL license. All that open source stuff was deliberately made corporation-friendly, which is not what's in the best interest of the code.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, and I paid for all the contributions to Linux too in that respect. It's fine, if the unpaid ones want to not do any more work, that's fine too. It was always about user freedom, and now we have it.
I honestly wonder about what percentage of the toxicity of society is a result of the awful copyright regime. Certainly another good chunk is a result of the patent system being broken.
I guess these are not the top items in the societal problems list, but they really don't help.
> 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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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 couldn’t find any PRs you merged this year.
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.
> 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.
adding features was not the easy part for me - in fact it was a barrier for expressing most ideas I had.
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.
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 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
1. https://github.com/SuperCmdLabs/SuperCmd
2. https://github.com/imputnet/helium
3. https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut
OpenCode
SuperCMD
Zed
Typewhisper
<3
> 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: we’re witnessing an unprecedented amount of slop, while also the tools get better and better.
So when talking about Open Source maintainer exhaustion, it’s 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
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.
>People need to stop yelling "Slop!" all the time
People are applying that label to anything that has the taint of AI on it. I get why.
I realize there are a lot of reasons why people hate AI, but one that is frequently cited is that it's dehumanizing. It's kind of ridiculous to see those same sort of people call something "slop" when I've put tens of hours into guiding the AI tooling. Talk about dehumanizing!