It used to suck when there was almost nobody contributing because it felt isolated. Worse was if your project did become popular, you would be managing loads of code AND spending loads of time managing the community than the code.

Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with, just a flood of code with few people you can't actually question it with. So back to isolation but with a million lines of code.

It feels like you would have to have a project with an direct artificial limit to increase the quality of submissions. Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.

While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.

I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.

All of this still happens in a world where people aren’t typing the individual code lines by hand.

You just have to adjust and move on. Don’t let your code quality decrease, fight off those that submit vibe coded bullshit and push forward. You’ll find there’s people still behind the prompts.

It’s not totally equivalent but there was a time where all programmers wrote assembly or the like. They’d look at JavaScript with disdain if they saw it in their day. Yet people kinda just.. moved on.

Nobody cares anymore, because literally everyone on the planet can literally make their own mini stacks of things, as another commenter just said.

It's sad, but I don't see any way to put the bunny back in the box.

At first i thought it was going to be a pure counter-AI rant, but no, the author admits using AI everyday in a variety of ways.

Another argument, maybe OSS of smaller packages is on its way out as we get to generate whatever is needed on the fly?

You said it was dead. How could there be any fix?

I'm not too surprised by the recent problems but I see them as intensifications, not a new problem. As development platforms became larger, low quality contributors and people who wanted something on their CV became more and more common. That there's never been any kind of trust system makes these issues inevitable.

Commercial dev is about results and money, and that makes AI almost impossible to resist.

OSS has always been about process. The pleasure is in tinkering with code, collaborating with friends on a fun new idea, and helping people. I don't care about speed.

At some point I think AI technology available to us will be advanced enough that "slop" is largely a thing of the past. Some of the issues here will still remain, but hopefully at that point a PR review could be largely automated, in a trustworthy way.

I can't really blame anyone involved in either side of the equation--Sindre Sorhus doesn't blame AI, and OP doesn't blame maintainers--this is just the natural evolution of.. everything! That which does not go extinct... evolves.

Or is it the other way around?

Doula your grief.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

1. https://www.viruscomix.com/page583.html

And in this case carefully crafted, clear, and expressive words that are not too verbose would be the contributions of tomorrow.

I keep going back to LLM Wiki. It has found itself in so many other skills because of its fundamental value. Maybe we don’t have as many pull requests. But that one skill has proliferated in so many other skills because of its value.