Maybe I’m seeing shadows in the clouds, but it seems like AI means a lot more people have been building open source tools.
I’m an AI skeptic, but I’m wondering if this can help undermine some of the shit software industry. Most AI tools sold by companies have an open source alternative.
I’m thinking that maybe AI will accidentally allow the private person to build free tools and reduce the market value of sold tools.
I’m conflicted because more people joining the open source community and contributing is great. That said, open source is an ecosystem that covers everything from the application, to the build system and the code editor used to write the code. A lot of the people contributing to FOSS care a lot about the quality of their code, and being part of it means respecting the community.
But most of the AI models being used to write vibe coded or ai assisted code is not at all sustainable, it’s a huge part of the toolset that is locked behind corporate infrastructure. A lot of code spit out by LLMs is rarely workable or designed to be extended or transformed, and very few are critical of the quality of the code. I know even at work I’ve been frustrated at having to fix, work with or re factor code that has been written with the help of ai.