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Interesting. I thought this will be another post about slop PRs and bug reports but no, it’s about open source project not being promoted by AI and missing on adoption and revenue opportunities.
So I think we definitely see (and will see more) ‘templatization’ of software development. Some ways of writing apps that are easy to understand for AI and are promoted by it will see wider and wider adoption. Not just tools and libraries but also folder structures, design patterns and so on. I’m not sure how bad this will be long term. Maybe it will just stabilize tooling? Do we really need new React state management library every 6 months?
Hard to tell how will this affect the development of proper tools (not vibe coded ones). Commercial tools struggling to get traction will definitely suffer but most of the libraries I use are hobby projects. I still see good tools with good documentation getting enough attention to grow, even fairly obscure ones. Then again, those tools often struggle with getting enough contributors… Are we going to see a split between vibe coded template apps for junior devs and proper tools for professionals? Will EU step in and found the core projects? I still see a way forward so I’m fairly optimistic but it’s really hard to predict what will happen in a couple of years.
The killing part is not necessarily people vibe coding programs into OSS projects, but even if the OSS itself is not vibe coded, people using AI to integrate with it will result in lower engagement and thus killing the ecosystem:
Together, these patterns suggest that AI mediation can divert interaction away from the surfaces where OSS projects monetize and recruit contributors.
From Section 2.3 of the reported paper.
If the abominable intelligence is killing every corner of things we consider good its time to start killing the “AI”…
Vibe coding is a black hole. I’ve had some colleagues try and pass stuff off.
What I’m learning about what matters is that the code itself is secondary to the understanding you develop by creating the code. You don’t create the code? You don’t develop the understanding. Without the understanding, there is nothing.
Yes. And using the LLM to generate then developing the requisite understanding and making it maintainable is slower than just writing it in the first place. And that effect compounds with repetition.
TheRegister had an article, a year or 2 ago, about using AI in the opposite way: instead of creating the code, someone was using it to discover security-problems in it, & they said it was really useful for that, & most of its identified things, including some codebase which was sending private information off to some internet-server, which really are problems.
I wonder if using LLM’s as editors, instead of writers, would be better-use for the things?
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A second pair of eyes has always been an acceptable way to use this imo, but it shouldnt be primary or only
They are pretty good at summarisation. If I want to catch up with a long review thread on a patch series I’ve just started looking at I occasionally ask Gemini to outline the development so far and the remaining issues.
How AI is killing everything.
Which is really it’s purpose, as far as i can see
LLMs definitely kills the trust in open source software, because now everything can be a vibe-coded mess and it’s sometimes hard to check.
LLMs definitely kills the trust in
open sourcesoftware, because now everything can be a vibe-coded mess and it’s sometimes hard to check.I don’t trust proprietary software anyway.
Might make open source more trustworthy, It can’t be any harder to check than closed source.
A week or two back there was a post on Reddit where someone was advertising a project they’d put up on GitHub, and when I went to look at it I didn’t find any documentation explaining how it actually worked - just how to install it and run it.
So I gave Gemini the URL of the repository and asked it to generate a “Deep Research” report on how it worked. Got a very extensive and detailed breakdown, including some positives and negatives that weren’t mentioned in the existing readme.
I don’t know yet how good Gemini about it,but I think https://deepwiki.com/ this tool will overkill anything for now
yeah it’s to the point now where if I see emojis in the readme.md on the repo I just don’t even bother.
ttbomk, emojis are legal function-names in both Swift & Julia…
The Swift example was damned incomprehensible, & … well, it was Apple stuff, so making it look idiotic might have been some kind of cultural-exclusivity intention…
The Julia stuff, though, means that you can use Greek symbols, etc, for functions, & get things looking more like what they should…
Also, I think emojis are actually better than my all-text style, for communicating intonation/emotion ( I’m old: learned last century ), & maybe us old geezers ought to adapt a bit, to such things…
That does NOT mean that cartoon “code” is good-enough, whether it’s cartoonish in plaintext or in emojis, though…
I’m just trying to keep the cultural-prejudice & the code-quality being distinct-categories of judgement, you know?
( & cultural-prejudice is an actual thing, though it’s usually called “religious wars”, isn’t it, in geekdom? )
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Check out this one I came across earlier - https://github.com/Jtensetti/fediverse-career-nexus/blob/main/README.md
It’s a federated LinkedIn. ofc it’s vibe coded.
well to be fair you don’t even need to look at the md since right at the top it says it’s built with loveable.
Man… of all the vibe coding tools, Lovable has gotta be one of the most useless, too.
I work with people (all middle managers) who love Loveable because they can type a two sentence description of an app and it will immediately vomit something into existence. But the code it generates is an absolute disaster and the UIs it designs (which is supposed to be its main draw) is some of the most generic crap I’ve ever seen.
0/10, do not recommend.
or anywhere. Job descriptions for example.
Got a job application this with a one line cover letter “Iam interested to work with u are company” it was kinda refreshing to see that instead of a whole page of slop, like most of them are these days.
This isn’t the problem with the AI, it’s the problem with the user. If you don’t know enough to select the library and make the AI use it, maybe you were never gonna finish the project without AI anyway.
