Yes, but only if you're very wealthy.
As always, everyone else can suck it.
Open-source was always strip-mined by massive corporations. It was main source of free labour for decades.
Unfortunately there are always people willing to subsidise these corporations with their time for a badge of "honour" and few pats on the back.
Great to see more people awaken to the fact corporations thrive on unpaid work whilst making billions for their shareholders.
I am yet to see this trickle down wink
Totally fair. The source code is open. Thanks for all the fish.
Insane. This is the guy who was proclaimed to be "nice" by his followers. The biggest LLM sellouts in open source are Ruby and Scala.
Ironically Oracle with Java is now being the good guy.
He started being ambivalent about it maybe two years ago, and reached metastasis in the latest Rails World fiasco, with dhh telling him to his face that his life's work (Matz's terms) is irrelevant now.
I'm not sure why he isn't rich enough to walk away.
I myself have been using an open source lib that I contributed a fix for and inquired about it. I didn't just drop a PR either, opened an issue, was told PRs accepted, opened a PR, signed a license agreement and then the PR just sort hung out for months without response even after some gentle prodding.
Now, they don't owe me anything and they don't have to merge the code, it is their repo after all. However what did I do? use an LLM, fork the repo with my changes and now "I" maintain that private fork and add to it as needed.
As time goes on I think these smaller packages / clients will start to disappear as people/LLMs just spit out a client library or whatever or just implement the same thing over and over. Combined with the opinion of the author I figure oss libs for npm, ruby, pypi etc will start to dwindle.
The top tier LLMs would be as good at this as a lot of maintainers, right?
I can totally identify with that feeling. It must be how professional mathematicians are feeling as well.
And also that on the other side of that grief is something new and potentially exciting, but very different than what we're all used to.
I don't know if it helps, but they should know that for every one of them that experiences this grief, it brings joy to ten other people that are now able to do things (make vibe-coded programs) that used to be out of reach for them.
imagine spending years to develop mastery of something that anyone can do now? For example, sitting your ass down in college, debugging lines of code on a Saturday night while people are out partying? It's fun to do, sure, but there's still a huge opportunity cost.
It's easy to say that such people are prideful, arrogant, only cares about being better than others, but I think such a feeling sucks for 99% of the population that are not siddharthas.
These developers whom have this God complex are going to find out they were Gods in their own minds real quickly.
Is this really the way you look at open-source libraries that are given to you for free, i.e. as a gift? I hope you look differently at gifts people give you in real life.
Now I can build things that would never have been possible without huge investments of time and/or money. The latest project: a hybrid human/AI tech newsroom that leverages LLM-driven advances in translation (https://asia-tech-news.ghost.io).
For my personal passions, LLMs have completely opened up areas that were extremely painful to deal with 5 or 10 years ago. Take genealogy: I used to manually transcribe old letters, and documents in foreign languages (often archaic specialized terms) were impossible for me to work with without seeking out specialized experts. The other night I had an AI go through a book of 200-year-old religious records and pick out references to potential ancestors. A few weeks earlier I worked on an old diary transcription (https://youtu.be/P6r1I-4T9is?si=qhaf3Wd5zZNjieEw) which I later shared with relatives to proof and enjoy. Such tasks are no longer a chore. It's fun again.
The closest comparison I can make was stumbling upon an old HTML tutorial on an MIT website 30+ years ago. All of a sudden, as a writer and creator, I was no longer tied to my employer's business model to get my words and images out to the world.
Take woodworking. For some people, the act and meditative work of building it piece by piece is the part that they strive for. For others, it’s the planning phase and the “how will all these pieces go together” phase. For even others, it’s the staining phase. Some people like every part, others like just one part and work through all that extra just to get the chance to do that next part. For some, while they may not enjoy the preface to the work they want, they appreciate it because they feel that blitzing past it cheapens the stage they love.
Everyone is different and AI is hitting everyone just a little bit differently, and that’s just in areas that directly impact their specific craft.
There is sharply reduced benefit to the maintainer, however as they are now buried in slop bug reports and PRs, and a bunch of people with no context and a Claude subscription think they can do it better.
I expect a lot of open-source maintainers will walk away from that particular bargain in the near future
Its definitely reasonable to be sad about the loss of our craft, but lashing out at others in a vague and undefined way is not it.
Some of the least skilled people are doing the screaming. They desperately want to establish a consensus that anyome can do what you do now and being skilled doesnt matter...
You know why? Because they have no skills, they're mediocre and the best way they can succeed in a meritocracy without skills is to get people with actual skills to give up, or become meat proxies for the machine like yourself, then maybe you'd stnad a chance.
People will downvote me here, and tell me I dont get it. No I do, you're not skilled and you dont want to have to compete on your own merits. You want me to be impressed with you because you make things with llms. Im not.
I was where it sounds like you are a month or so ago (denial), so no downvotes here. It definitely sucks; it's like losing a huge part of my identity. I'm still grieving it.
I'm trying to deal with it by separating my identity from my job. I can still write code or learn new languages in my free time (such as it is). It's mostly a hobby now. And I can choose to not use LLMs at all in my personal life. But I do have bills to pay and a family to support, so at work I'm trying to learn how to do my new job of LLM orchestrator/babysitter. It's way less fun, but the money's still decent, so I'm hoping I can swallow my pride enough to keep going.
You might already have _been_ the problem here.
Fixed that typo ;)
Entirely fair. It will be very very interesting to see what happens to software when everyone is running their own vendored fork trying to maintain them with AI agents.
Will the whole thing collapse under its own complexity? Or will smarter agents eventually dig their way out of the hole dug by their predecessors?
A lot of people get involved in open source because of the sense of community or because they like the idea of giving something to the world.
What's the point in contributing to opensource if your work gets violated by vibecoders and corps that disrespect your licensing and give you no credit while simultaneously clamiing your work is useless and you're going to be replaced by a LLM model?
Any ecosystem declines when there are too many cynical grifters compared to well meaning hard working people.
Will be quite funny when there's a noticeable decline in stability and development—despite having AI—because it turns out you actually need talented, creative people to build the building blocks the AI spits out. LLMs can parrot but they're basically the Crazy Town [1] of software development.
I started learning to write code when I was 11, in year 2000, out of pure curiosity of how tech works. I remember when a family friend opened up our very first computer, a Gateway desktop, to change out the modem that was no longer supported after an OS upgrade and the excitement and awe I felt seeing the boards and cables eager to know more. I got back online and immediately started wanting learning how to build web pages.
I learned Flash and ActionScript in high school then got my first job as a developer building websites for local small businesses when I was 18 while in college. Most of those were largely custom Wordpress or PBBoard installs and configs. That was my 3rd job while I was majoring in aerospace, with no insight that programming could even be a career. It was just a fun part-time job for me.
A couple changes in major, a degree in computer science, several startups, and 19 years later here I am wondering whether I really want to stay in tech at all. The joy of solving problems using tech is just dead. My tagline on LinkedIn for a decade has been "Solving problems, sometimes with code" which is as true now as it ever was, but it's hard to reconcile what's happening now with why I got into this to begin with.
It was never about the money for me, otherwise I'd have worked at any of the big tech companies when I was getting hounded by recruiters for years. Instead, I've opted for the fun challenges at startups and getting to be closer to the customer, flexing my skills across disciplines and specialties. I'm mourning how the joy and spark are fading, but I'm also mourning what we are losing in the field. Things used to be about more than just the work, and you may think I'm naive for believing that, but it's very clearly just about the work and output now. It's soulless.
The pool they're talking about isn't software or CS, it's the attached treadmill that provides social kudos and credit for a job well done.
This whole thing has been a huge revelation for me in that I naively presumed at first that other 'computer people' were also in it for the passion and interest in the hobby, now I am realizing quicker and quicker that "it's just a job" for the majority of people I talk to, the rest of the people do it "for exposure" , which is a nice way of saying that they're playing the Facebook/MySpace social kudos game with their linkedins and github profiles and blog articles.
very few Terry style "just passionate about the thing" people out there, and I had never realized how rare that was.
Casey Muratori had a take on a podcast that I liked comparing writing code vs. using an LLM to generate code to playing guitar by hand vs. playing digital music. Although it's arguably more efficient to play an mp3, people still enjoy the art of playing the guitar.
Reminder: oracle is also an acronym, and you might want to take a gander at what its subject is up to.
There is no future in which oracle is the good guy no matter the axis. Least of all the subject of AI.
I'm pretty sure someone will soon call Linus a sell-out. The hate / denial / radicalisation is just sad at this point... Do, or don't, but at least don't hate the others. Be and let be. No need to call other people names just because you don't like their sand castle. There's plenty of sand on the beach.
Edit: I'm at a loss for words.
Obviously this is not true for every SWE. A lot of people feel liberated now that the burden of actually writing the code is being replaced by molding it through the interaction with AI. I see people that struggle because they've identified with the writing code part a lot and that's gone now that the machine is doing it, I bet that's hard.
In other words, people who just wanted to become managers.
If someone loves building technology products that doesn't mean they were "only in it for the money". Beyond just being disparaging for no reason, you're missing the path out of the depression-pit here.
If tech paid less, say minimum wage, they would all leave and none of them would ever tinker around anything in their free time. I’m not depressed, I’m just disappointed by how many folks are like that in this industry I loved.
That just means the agent is doing most of the problem solving, I recommend fully offloading all problem solving to the agent, if not possible now it will be possible soon, and then you can stop larping as a technologist and go pursue your actual passion.
Why do they have to hate coding, technology and problem solving, that makes no sense. They just use coding agents to write the code for them to use technology and solve problem.
I happen to love the process of building software by coordinating agents. It’s an addictive form of flow state that I enjoy a great deal - similar to the flow state I get playing real time strategy games like Age of Empires. It’s a different kind of flow state than writing code, for sure.
But to say that the only people who enjoy building software in this new way are those who hated coding, technology, or problem solving is simply untrue.
I realized I most enjoy higher level problem solving but don’t really enjoy implementation. Like I enjoy algorithms, data structures, memory allocation strategies, SIMD optimization, etc. But writing the code, and debugging it is tedious and takes me out of flow.
And if I’m really interested in the project itself then the algorithms take a back seat and I enjoy the even higher level problem solving of building a cool project.
I don’t think it makes you lesser to enjoy these things more than literally banging out code, and hunting down bugs. Perhaps I’ve written enough code that I don’t find the same joy in that. Who knows.
Let's not forget that there is this silver lining of the tech. We can be free[1].
__
[1] Requiring a one-time payment of about $200000 + a small gas turbine
In the corporate setting I think though it won't take a lot of time to reduce the layers and number of people that are required to run a software company. Either one becomes a more general work manager or obsolete I guess.
All of your potential customers are just going to vibecode their own software. In many cases they won't even realize that software they vibecoded even exists as it will just be an invisible tool the LLM built for itself to reproduce a similar solution to a similar prompt over and over.
Once AI flattens out any company enough, the company itself no longer needs to exist, it can trivially be replaced by the model providers.
There's a ton of magical thinking out there where people seem to assume AI will progress right up to the point where it is maximally beneficial to their job without replacing them. Keep huffing that copium, folks.
AI is great enabler for stuff that you don't want to be good at, it cut a ton of chore type jobs out of my workflow, but for stuff you do want to get better and care for, it's both joy killer, and if you're not careful you will only learn how to prompt, not how the stuff works.
I love code as a craft. I love spending time designing the perfect abstraction. I love seeing it come together in the implementation stage. I love the troubleshooting process and the understanding that comes when you finally engage with the root cause of the issue. I love all of this so much that I ship little, all my time is spent in process.
I also love code as a tool. I love working tirelessly towards describing a goal and then watching it come to completion. I love knowing my projects consume terabytes of data and spit out useful results. I love seeing my assumptions on the outcome proved right or wrong.
Now I can do the latter without the former, and it leaves me deeply conflicted. A large part of me is more excited than I've ever been. Another part of me is quite sad, and this is unfortunately the part where my ego lives. For now, I keep it in check by asking the LLM to describe the pros/cons of alternative architectures. That way I stay learning about the products I create.
I never cared about the social aspects of it other than releasing the odd plugin I developed.
My social life is entirely offline.
Speak for yourself.
the functionally same product is still being made, but there is less human involvement in the craft, and more of a human management over the manufacturing process
Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.
What happens when you don't understand them anymore?
Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control. The objects upholding your life are incomprehensible to you, you cannot change them or even only reliably exchange them with alternatives.
The chilling bit is that the machines are doing just fine on the understanding programs front (up to and including decompiling them from machine code).
And even if you understand how it works, how does it affect your day-to-day function or the advancement of the field? As Apple liked to say, It Just Works (TM).
Instead of driving you're telling a piece of nondeterministic software where you'd like to go and then watching the result as a passenger.
Would you be willing to drive one if the engineers at ford were all fired and an almighty agent who kinda did the almost right thing most of the time was designing the black box?
So yes, maybe we will all just exist to get sued at the end of the day.
For me it's about losing much of the entire career, because companies will come to expect AI-level work that I can't/won't provide.
> Being able to program means in particular, you can read those programs and understand what they do.
IMO This assumes that one views programming as more than just a job/career, but not everyone does so.
> Living in a reality where everything is a black box, doing its thing as if by magic, leaves you in a position devoid of control.
For some, this is actually relieving. Sometimes we want to be more ignorant, sometimes it makes us happier.
The point isn't some people not understanding whatever stuff with limited effects, it's no people understanding anything important.
Mathematics is about describing fundamental reality, so you can change it. When corporations own it exclusively, they can do whatever they want with it.
Probably the LLMs saved me because deep down I knew that my own power by itself wouldn't be enough to let me do what I really want, but right now the future does seem bright.
If not all agents are equal and require calibration, then it seems like people can specialize, so you're only competing with other specialists in that area (and not necessarily trying to out-compete).
That's a great point. I don't have experience with woodworking, but when I see a piece of good antique furniture with precise dove-tail joints that someone made hundreds of years ago, that brings me joy.
As a writer, and as a reader, I really value human-crafted insights, like many of the comments I see every day on HN. As many people have stated elsewhere, writing forces you to organize your thoughts.
But I also recognize that there is a place for machine-generated content, whether it's the weather report on my phone or the factory-produced chair I'm sitting on now.
I don't think the story of artificial intelligence is "humans will stop creating." AIs are powerful tools, but they shouldn't be regarded as mutually exclusive with people who like to create things. Some will create in old ways. Some will create in new ways. Others will move onto new ways of creating.
Personally I enjoyed the act of programming/building. I'm struggling to put this into words, but software engineers have often been interested in solving technical problems, rather than business problems. At least I've felt this personally. I'm working on shifting that enjoyment toward the requirements gathering/design process. At the end of the day, it's still problem solving (which is the root of what I enjoy). But now it's more focused on solving business problems vs. technical problems. Which at the end of the day, is what is valuable to the business.
From the business perspective, this is great, because the end goal of software for the business is "business value". But it is a tough shift for some people to make (me included).
Edited to add: Writing code vs. designing software are both creative. Writing code has a much more concrete/objective feedback loop though.
I also particularly hate the feeling of AI being shoved down everyone's throat.
And I don't enjoy digging through the mess that AI creates, whenever I have a particular bug that it can't quite get right.
lbrito•58m ago
>When people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand, they’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer sustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.
vegnus•56m ago
phoronixrly•55m ago
smallerize•55m ago
throwawaysleep•52m ago
SoftTalker•48m ago
pc86•43m ago
vegnus•19m ago
10111001•52m ago
The Claude Code development team has pioneered that new way of sleeping.
hypfer•47m ago
sheepscreek•46m ago
chrismarlow9•25m ago
10111001•45m ago
runarberg•45m ago
sheepscreek•42m ago
I think the author is trying to say that a code base once infected with vibes, becomes indecipherable to the average human being. It's still just code, but full of Claudisms.
wk_end•24m ago
x187463•39m ago
The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.
We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.
symfoniq•34m ago
x187463•5m ago
jacquesm•31m ago
(1) We help you
(2) We undercut you
(3) You go out of business
(4) Your buddies go out of business as well
(5) Prices start rising
Supermarkets, restaurant chains, mathematicians or programmers it makes no difference.
luckydata•32m ago
No, not really.
barbazoo•31m ago
serf•31m ago
Next time someone complains about software do me a favor and compare it to a nail through the foot or grabbing a hot dish and burning yourself or something else negative in the human experience. There is plenty to choose from.
We don't need 300 variations of enshitification, the folks at Pompeii and Herculaneum have that well covered.