We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-demand app store where features / forks are shared/upvoted/evolved by the community where the maintainers don't have to get burnt out, and when it inevitably becomes a ball of mud oh well it does the job? I really don't know!
I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?
Review is indeed the main bottleneck now for open source, and we need to solve it. Introducing more friction is hardly helping.
I can see why that doesn't sound great particularly on a team where everyone knows each other and is working together but it totally makes sense for me if I were maintaining a project that was large enough to get a lot of low-effort PRs coming into it.
A company is usually already a high-trust environment, where people use real names and have real reputations. So creating an issue cannot serve the purpose of increasing trust.
Are there concrete patterns that somebody could write a linter to auto evaluate for this?
> My initial task when a new unexpected PR arrives is to determine if there is a person behind it or not, and luckily this is easy to figure out in just a few seconds.
OK. How? That would have been an interesting explanation to me.
Have you never seen vibe-slopped PRs?
> I do not want an LLM-generated novel with chapters, bullet points and emojis, just a simple description of the problem in your own voice.
> If I don't see proof of human involvement, then I'm not interested
By vibe. That's what people who believe they can detect AI do.
I have a Jira queue. It drives what work I do. I may have some leeway in how I do the work, and what tickets I pull, but Im absolutely at the behest of the ticketing behemoth.
Tickets have been my life since I started helpdesk. And future roles will also be ticketed. And they almost all are customer-facing or system-breakage (which impacts lots of customers).
Im not sure what IT roles im capable of doing wouldnt have tickets. So, yeah. Reverse centaur.. But not an AI driven reverse centaur, yet.
I feel bad for people like him who get the brunt of dilettantes who can "code" polluting his time and focus. Reminds me of that mitch hedberg joke: "When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying here you throw this away." but for PRs
I think it does but there are weird dynamics I don’t fully understand. I’m curious about HNs thoughts.
My theories: Centralization around key projects due to AI pointing new users towards them. (At the same time this drives up the PR deluge onto these projects. Especially from newer users already heavily using llms.)
So many low effort AI-generated open source libraries that it becomes harder to tell signal from slop. More movement to the bigger projects because they are perceived as safer bets.
Sucks, because open source was a really wonderful thing for many years but we should not continue to create fuel for the theft machines
I wouldn’t pretend to have an answer. of course. Opens Source means, always meant, different things to different people.
I know what always counted for me:
1. Copyleft License
2. No CLA or Copyright assignment
3. Diverse group of contributors
I sympathize with Miguels point but it bothers me it clashes with point 3 in my list. If you hand select your contributors[1] you will never reach the diversity necessary to effectively make relicensing impossible. Without that Open Source matters less to me.
[1] I admit that controlled set of known contributors has other advantages too.
My lawn == I'm not wasting any of my dwindling old man time on bullshit people vomit out. You want to do that, you fork and leave me out.
I maintain the hope that those technically minded who are really interested in coding and care about doing things properly using their own reasoning on all levels of detail will find each other and maybe become less diluted as a community by the coding-just-for-money crowd than in the past decade or two.
There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited.
I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was usually obvious when a PR was either completely terrible or very half-baked, and the required effort to create even a shitty PR was usually more than that required to reject it.
AI makes it trivial to make a completely terrible PR, and much easier to make a not-immediately-obviously-bad PR.
This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to where in corporate situations a reader can't say no to doing work for a selfish writer.
On the other hand, there are also people who start coding with AI, and those people will love a large part of code that isn't pretty but works.
Some will say that messy code will ruin software in the long run, while others will think otherwise. This reminds me of Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. This means that for any type of thing, there are quality items and inferior ones, and quality items make up about 10%. The 10% of code created by AI will be valuable, and only 10% of human-written code was valuable. AI has just increased the amount of crap.
Whenever I think about these issues, I always think of Undertale. Undertale's code is overwhelmingly messy, yet it's a masterpiece often cited as one of the best games. I love it too. But Leaked Undertale code (its quality) is terribl
Ultimately, it seems that AI's usefulness and harmfulness are determined by the purpose for which it is used.
If someone enjoys code quality, long-term perspective, and intellectual exchange and interaction with people from these kinds of discussions, they will be hostile toward AI.
On the other hand, someone like me, who is in a community that has a hostile attitude toward on-time delivery for clients and learning (based on mockery and disregard), will be receptive to AI.
Honestly, I am a direct beneficiary of AI. I'm on the side of consuming the results managed by open-source maintainers, so I can't fully understand their position. I just think, 'That must be incredibly hard for them.'
In my case, AI writes English functions and documentation, and by using AI to refactor English function/variable names that were previously hard to use, I can now write code that's easier to read.
But since my role mainly involves assembling things using IoC on top of frameworks, I see more advantages. The downside is that my coding skill declines, I suppose. I'm a traveling contract programmer who often goes on-site to work with legacy codebases and add features to them.
Actually, my workflow hasn't changed much. It's just that the legacy codebase has become an AI-generated codebase. My workflow of debugging and tracing the flow there hasn't changed, so I'm probably in the beneficiary camp.
Conversely, people like the OP have seen a massive change in the number of PRs they need to handle, so it's understandable. The intellectual exchange with people they've always had, and the values that come from that, have been damaged.
This is a really difficult problem.
I can understand wanting to minimize your interaction with LLMs, so this might not be an attractive solution. But it seems like a worthwhile feature to have on the platform level for people who would like to continue to accept pull requests without the frustration. Much better than throwing up your hands and wondering if open source is dead.
Similar is true for a lot of software. Credit list on video games… I don't want to say it "mostly" isn't coders, but only because I've not done an exhaustive study. My guess is the top will either be QA or art.
Those professionals are professionals not because they own an iPhone and use it to shoot something.
Orders of magnitude more people can now make an absolutely "Hollywood quality" movie, precisely due to their nice modern iPhone cameras.
The only question now is, how do we make it so more people can see the good ones?
You can make art with a literally piece of shit, or a toilet if you want to be more traditional, at least in 1917.
You can't be a craftsperson without mastery of your domain and its tool.
You can be a artist without craftsmanship and vice versa.
You can also be popular without any or both of these.
There is a lot to entangle there but the point is that it depends on your goal. You can judge others based on your own value system but there goals might not be yours.
You mean some modern version of vb or php?
That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.
There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it and generally they all coexist hapily
At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.
A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.
What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?
It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce
would i care if someone else is proud in that scenario? also no.
If you order a pizza from an app, and assume you can pick ingredients from a checklist, would you consider it "making" a pizza? Would people get the feeling of accomplishment?
The sense of accomplishment does not necessarily require much accomplishment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
and
There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.
Our CEO just took a design mock-up of a new landing page and threw it into Fable, and it spit out an objectively better iteration of the component's design. The hierarchy made more sense, the typography was more polished, and it naturally incorporated some elements we hadn't added yet.
We won't implement everything it changed of course, but it's the first time I've seen a model take a decent draft of a webpage mockup and improve it in a way that feels like a more evolved version of the original instead of just LLM-ifying it.
I don’t want software written by plebs.
I think no answers are needed.
If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his thing.
If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to it), then it will progress in that direction. If it makes no sense it is a fad that eventually dies out.
There may or may not be a baby in the bathwater. In truth nothing in this bathtub matter too much.
But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just completely stopped pulling the lever.
However, I can see that for the right people, this level of difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the features that are collectively termed "gamification."
In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers.
Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc.
When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment. They helped this idea become a _real thing_! All of that pride, despite not writing a single line of code nor polishing any pixels themselves. And I don't think anybody would reasonably look down on them for that feeling.
Same thing with using LLMs. Sure, you didn't write the code. But you caused the thing to exist! That's exciting!
I have a good friend who is a VP at a telecom company who has never written a line of code. He's been using Claude to create interactive web pages to help him understand parts of the company.
He was so excited when he got something to work he called me immediately.
I'm sure the code isn't what you or I would write, but it is good enough for my friend. That said, heaven help him if he loses access to Claude. ;-)
2. The world has changed in such a way that X now exists
3. You took even a tiny action towards #2
Even if the main goal was #2, Is it really hard to see how there might not be some sense of accomplishment? Many investors take pride in the impact the companies they invested in have on the real world; this is the same thing in the small.
maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!
It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
It'd also be really nice that if you received some such software that you'd have the right to run the program as you wish, study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish, and the freedom to redistribute either the original, or your modifications to the software?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...
...we can dream though, can't we?
tehjoker•1h ago
WorldMaker•28m ago
I think there are so many hard questions right now for "Does open source even matter any more?" and many of those questions seem particularly demotivating to me right now, especially because we don't seem to be at risk of getting some, much less better, answers any time soon.